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Adding tape devices to the Charon-HPA emulated HP3000 or HP9000 system is a process consisting of several steps:
- Link the tape container files and/or physical tape devices with the corresponding HP3000 or HP9000 paths in the Charon configuration file and load the devices.
- Enable the tape for use by the guest operating system.
The storage on the host system just must provide enough capacity to store the tape containers used as virtual tapes by the emulated system.
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Step | Configuration file entry | |
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| 1 | Load the SCSI device. | load MKXnnn |
| 2 | Link the device with tape container file
physical tape device |
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| 3 | Enable loading the virtual tape automatically (for virtual tapes based on container file). |
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The path can point to an existing tape container file, but this is not mandatory. The emulator can create the container file if required.| Div | ||
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The parameter MKXnnn encodes the device type and the device path of the emulated SCSI device presented to the guest operating system:
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A tape device name has the following components:
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Using Tapes on HP-UX Guest Systems
Displaying the Tape Configuration in HP-UX
After booting HP-UX with the virtual tape device configuration, you can use the command ioscan -C tape -fun to verify if the device has been was found and the driver has been was loaded. The following image shows an example:
The example shows two type devices and their associated special devices.
The lssf command can be used to verify that the special files point to the correct device paths, SCSI target ID and LUN.
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Loading and Ejecting the Virtual Tape in HP-UX
Using the autoload Configuration Option
If autoload has been enabled in the configuration, the virtual tape is "loaded" and the container file created, if required, when the tape device is accessed.
Multi-volume backup does software may not work correctly when autoload is enabled. If a new tape is requested by the software, it will not wait for a new tape to load but overwrite the existing file. If data is to be written to several tapes, this needs to be configured manually or implemented manually (e.g., by a customized script).
For example, the following command will cause the container file for device /dev/rmt/0mnb (default tape device) to be created and opened:
# mt statusDrive: HP C1537AFormat:Status: [41114701] BOT online compression immediate-report-modeFile: 0Block: 0 |
The tape can be "ejected" by setting it to offline (device-name is the full path to the special file):
# mt -f <device-name> offl |
After the offline command, the container file can be removed (i.e., the tape can be archived).
To simulate the "swapping" of tapes, use the sequence:
- Release a loaded tape so its container file can be moved away:
mt -f <devicename> offl - Write to the tape as required (this will create a new container file, if needed).
- Release the loaded tape so its container file can be moved away:
mt -f <devicename> offl
Using Manual Tape Loading from the hp9k Console
In some cases it may be useful to load/unload tapes manually from the hp9k console instead of using autoload. This is achieved by the following command:
Load a tape:
hp9k> MKXnnn.load |
Unload a tape:
hp9k> |
Where MKXnnn stands for the virtual tape configuration name, for example, MKA500.
If no tape is "loaded" in the virtual tape device, the command
mt -f <device-name> status
will show a status of 0.
Reading and Writing Tapes in HP-UX
There are several commands that can be used to write data to / read data from the virtual tapes, for example,
- tar
- fbackup/frecover
- dump/restore
- vxdump/vxrestore
Please refer to your HP-UX documentation for details about the usage of these utilities.
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