Mar 18

If you have an Enterprise Agreement or Volume License from Microsoft you may wish to bookmark this one. When downloading SQL 2005 Standard or Express you have 2 iso’s to download. One has a #1 in the name and the other #2 in the name. Grab them both. The first is the servers install and the second is the tools. If you happen to only get the first, you will soon learn you cannot install the management consoles and other client connectivity options. Oh sure the setup will allow you to select them. You’ll even get the installation to kick off and run a bit. But rest assured by the time you get back from lunch your install will have failed. You’ll see a message like:

    There was an unexpected failure during the setup wizard. You may review the setup logs and/or click the help button for more information.

You can go and double check your logs to make sure it is the same issue. Check the logs here:

    C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\90\Setup Bootstrap\LOG\Files

If it turns out to be the same issue you should see something like the following:

Running: InstallToolsAction.10 at: 2006/4/8 16:46:2
Error: Action "InstallToolsAction.10" threw an exception during execution. Error information reported during run:
Target collection includes the local machine.
Fatal Exception caught while installing package: "10"
Error Code: 0x80070002 (2)
Windows Error Text: The system cannot find the file specified. Source File Name: sqlchaining\sqlprereqpackagemutator.cpp
Compiler Timestamp: Tue Aug 9 01:14:20 2005
Function Name: sqls::SqlPreReqPackageMutator::modifyRequest
Source Line Number: 196
---- Context -----------------------------------------------
sqls::InstallPackageAction::perform
WinException caught while installing package. : 1603
Error Code: 0x80070643 (1603)
Windows Error Text: Fatal error during installation. Source File Name: packageengine\installpackageaction.cpp
Compiler Timestamp: Fri Jul 1 01:28:25 2005
Function Name: sqls::InstallPackageAction::perform
Source Line Number: 167
---- Context -----------------------------------------------
sqls::InstallPackageAction::perform

If everything checks out this far then here is how to fix it. You need #1 and #2 iso’s. Extract #1 to *:\sql2005\servers. Then extract #2 to *:\sql2005\tools. Now rerun your setup from the servers directory. Now when you select to install servers and client components etc it will successfully install.

Source I used to fix my problem the first time.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/916760/en-us

Mar 14

Every morning I pick up my blackberry and look at an email from TSM Operational Reporting. If you are responsible for a Tivoli Storage Manager install you should be looking at a report from TSM Operational Reporting at sometime during your day as well. TSMOR has two key reports that can be emailed to you. The daily and hourly reports work in tandem to give you a wide range of information when it is needed and focused information if there is ever a problem. In addition TSMOR has the ability to store a current as well as previous reports, using html formatting, in a directory. Until TSMOR became available there was hardly any way to easily see the health of your TSM environment.

TSM Operational Reporting’s daily report is about as complete of a report you can get. Beginning with a general summary of the target TSM server some of the items monitored are shown below.

These are simple counts or numbers:

    Administrative Schedules – Success, Error, Fail, Missed
    Client Schedules – No error, Skipped files, warnings, Errors, Failed, Missed
    Total GB – Backed up, Restored, Archived, Retrieved
    Database and Log utilization
    DB Cache Hit Ratio
    Diskpool Utilization
    Scratch and Unavailable Volumes

Then it gives you some detailed information of the Administrative Schedules and Client Schedules. Detail such as what missed or failed. At this point I have a solid idea of the health and success of the previous backup cycle. From here I can move on to troubleshooting problems if needed or can safely move on to other tasks if everything was successful. While scrolling down I pass up some awesome looking but often not useful for me graphs of different load summaries. I’ll list them to see if any catch your attention.

    Session Load Summary
    Tape Mount Load Summary
    Migration Load Summary
    Reclamation Load Summary
    Database Backup Load Summary
    Storage Pool backup Load Summary
    Expiration Load Summary

These graphs are useful for more of an 50,000 ft overview of the loads your server is under through out the day. If I want a bit more detail on the clients such as Bytes Transfered or Node versions I can simply scroll down. The Node Activity Summary is one section I watch frequently. It give a list of Nodes and their version of TSM BAClient. This is currently very useful in my environment as I am currently phasing out 5.3.x.x and moving to 5.5.0.4. Support for 5.3.x.x is not going to be available after April 30th, 2008.

The next section I have recently had to turn off. Activity Log Details is the out put of your activity log for the past 24 hours. I have a few HSM for Windows clients and these have been generating a lot of information in the activity log. So much information in fact that it actually made my daily report fail. After disabling this section in the daily report, it runs just fine.

The Missed File Summary is useful at times. An example would be a new agent on all of your machines that has a file that is being skipped on all of the machines. You will see the number of occurrences of skipped files and the name of those files. The next section Missed File Details is what I actually use to troubleshoot missed files. It gives you two key pieces of information. The node name and the unc path to the file. The third piece of information is the time at which it was skipped. This time can be useful if you know some other job doesn’t finish or start until a certain time to release the file. The first two pieces of information should give you enough information to know if you need to edit your include/excludes.

The Session Summary section is awesome. But mostly used for bragging. If you are a backup administrator the only thing that comes close to being able to say you can and have restored anything is how fast you can do it. This section will list for each node:

    Objects Inspected, Backed Up, Updated, Rebound, Failed
    Bytes Moved
    Elapsed Time
    Aggregated Rate KB/Sec
    Percent Compressed

If you are like me knowing how many objects and how fast they moved and the total size of that data is a very good number to know. For instance for nodes with lots of objects it may be worth it to have the tivoli journal engine running. Slow aggregated Rate and high bytes moved can sometimes reveal network bottlenecks. Session Summary is available for both backup sessions and archive sessions as well as restores and retrieves. The last section is Timing Information which is how long it took in each section to gather the data.

I hope this review and summary has informed you a bit. There are many other features which I did not cover but may do so at a later time. In case you would like to research them on your own I will point you in the right direction. You can create multiple daily and hourly reports. You can create your own custom select statements to pull data you need for your environment. You also have the ability to change any the parameters that cause the hourly report to notify you or show errors. One I change is number of scratch tapes required to be health from 5 to 3. I also have the hourly report only email me if there is a problem, such as out of scratch or a log filling up. You may also want to look at per node notifications which would be very handy in larger IT organizations where backups are done on servers you do not care about but some one else does.

Mar 12

Here are some commands that may be helpful. Unfortunately, VMWare’s latest readme included in the latest Consolidated Backup integration Module VMware-ibm-tsm-integration-64559 does not talk about TSM 5.5 – only 5.3, 5.3.3, and 5.4. At the time of this writing, it does not look like TSM 5.5.0.4 is fully supporting full vm backups, only file level. I have reviewed this document from IBM on using VMWare Consolidated Backup with TSM 5.5 many times and cannot find any information on full vm backups. I expect a newer tsm integration module to be out soon, as this one was made in September 2007 where the info center document is from November 2007.

VMWare
Mounting:
To manually mount a VM’s file system using vcbmounter use:
vcbmounter -h vcms.domain.com -u vcuser -p vcpass -a ipaddr:vmguest.domain.com -r c:\mnt\tsmvmbackup\filelevel -t file

To manaully mount a vm for full backup use this instead
vcbmounter -h vcms.domain.com -u vcuser -p vcpass -a ipaddr:vmguest.domain.com -r c:\mnt\tsmvmbackup\fullvm -t fullvm

unmounting:
To unmount either use:
vcbmounter -h vcms.domain.com -u vcuser -p vcpass -U c:\mnt\tsmvmbackup\fullvm\vmguest
or
vcbmounter -h vcms.domain.com -u vcuser -p vcpass -U c:\mnt\tsmvmbackup\filelevel\vmguest

Tivoli
To manually start a backup using file level against a vm.
dsmc backup vm -vmlist=vmguest -vmchost=vcmserver -vmcuser=vcuser -vmcpw=vcpassword

The ability to offload your backups to a dedicated machine is great. Especially if you run your ESX servers as close to the edge as possible. I personally have a cluster with 38 virtual machines on 2 dell 2950′s with 16 GB of ram each. I find myself assigning 512 MB of memory to a server and I will allow it more as I see fit.

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