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source backup application (for example, assign it to dedicated front-end Fibre Channel ports that
you can zone away from the source backup application agents). Best practices include creating
more library slots than initially needed in the source and target virtual libraries to provide room
for future growth.
NOTE:
On a VLS6200 that is acting as a target device, you must enable compression when
creating the virtual tape drives in the target virtual library (because all the replicated cartridges on
the target device will be software compressed and you will not be able to read these tapes via the
target virtual library unless it has compressed tape drives). If the source device is also a VLS6200,
this should have software compression disabled on the source virtual library tape drives because
deduplication performance will be significantly degraded if software compressed drives are used
for backups.
After creating the virtual libraries, create the virtual cartridges. If starting from a blank state on
both source and target devices, you only need to create virtual cartridges in the replication target
library. The matching cartridges are automatically created in the source virtual library when the
echo copy pool is created.
However, if you are starting with an existing source device that already has a virtual library
containing virtual cartridges with backup data, in order to retain the existing backup data you
must use the following process to prepare for replication:
Create a virtual library on the target device with enough slots to hold the number of current
source device cartridges that you want to replicate (plus additional slots for future growth).
Manually create matching virtual cartridges (with the same barcodes, cartridge sizes, and
cartridge type) in the target virtual library that match the source device cartridges that you
want to replicate.
When you create the echo copy pool on the source device, this automatically links the matching
cartridges on the source and target.
NOTE:
Only backups performed after replication is configured will be replicated. Backups that
were performed before replication configuration will not be replicated until the tapes are overwritten
by the backup application (for example, after the retention time for the older backups the virtual
cartridges will be recycled and reused for new backups which will then replicate).
You must also prepare the TCP/IP network connection between the source and target devices. In
VLS devices, the node0 will already have a TCP/IP address assigned to its external Gbit LAN
connection to allow device management (GUI, CLI, etc.) and this existing connection is also used
for node0 replication traffic. However, in multi-node device configurations you must also assign
TCP/IP addresses to every node (matching the static or DHCP mode on node0) in both the source
and target VLS devices in order to balance the replication load across the entire device. (See
Multi-node Replication Scaling
jobs across all the nodes that have an external TCP/IP address configured. The VLS GUI provides
the means to configure the secondary node TCP/IP settings in the "Network Settings" task under
Maintenance Tasks on the Chassis screen (note that the order of the nodes on this screen is not
sequential):
134 VLS Configuration and Backup Application Guidelines
for details.) The VLS will automatically balance the active replication
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