HP Insight Managament Agents and RSM disabling Tape Storage Wei Jung Shih Hung July 2008.

HP Insight Managament Agents and RSM disabling

Tape StorageWei Jung Shih Hung

July 2008

March, 2008

HP Insight Management Agents

As RSM (Removable Storage), the HP SIM can cause polling to tape drives.

ISSUE: HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) Management Agents software is designed to poll devices to determine their status. The polling of fibre connected tape drives that are running backups can sometimes interfere with the backup process, causing the backup to fail. When this issue occurs, the tape drive may stop responding (hang), have degraded performance, or a tape controller reboot may occur. This issue is known to affect HP Management Agents v 7.3 and earlier. Evidence of this issue can also be seen in the System Event log, where an error message that is similar to the following is logged:

Event ID: 9 Source: ScsiDrv The device, \Device\ScsiPort0, did not respond within the timeout period.

Please refer to the following article for further reference:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c00744222&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

March, 2008


WORKAROUND: For HP Management Agents v 7.2 (and later) fiber tape polling can be disabled by completing the following steps:

Click HP Management Agents applet in the Control Panel .

Select the Storage tab and click Disable Fibre Agent Tape Support to insert a checkmark, which disables polling.

For HP Management Agents v 7.0 or v 7.1, an HP utility that allows fibre tape polling to be disabled is available. You can also use this utility: ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp25501-26000/SP25792.EXE

CAUSE: In order to check the status of a tape drive, the HP Management Agents perform SNMP polling. Because of the multi-hosted nature of backups on storage area networks (SANs), the polling done by the HP Management Agents can cause the tape controller or tape drives to become unstable as a result of the flooding of requests coming from the multiple hosts that can see the devices. As a result, the tape drive may hang, have degraded performance, or a tape controller reboot may occur. Reducing the polling interval on the device does not resolve the issue because the flooding may occur randomly.

March, 2008


Manually disabling Fiber Agent

Go to the Control Panel and select the HP Management Agents

Go to the Storage tab and make sure that the Disable Fiber Agent Tape Support is CHECKED. This will disable the polling that the Fiber Agent could potentially been causing in the tape drive.

March, 2008

HP Insight Management Agents (Other issues)

HP SIM Agents

We have been experiencing another issue with several other agents from HP SIM, which will cause tape backups to fail after a few minutes or after 100GB or so of running, also it can cause potential performance issues. These are the HP NIC, Server and Storage Agents. This agents will cause the same polling issue on the tape device while it’s performing backups. Notice: There is no advisory out yet regarding this problem, and this is not OFFICIAL fix yet.

Go to the control panel and in HP Management Agents, in the Services tab, make sure that the following agents are moved to Inactive:

- NIC Information

- Storage Remote Alerter

- Server Remote Alerter

March, 2008

HP Insight Management Agents (Other issues)

Now go to the Windows services and make sure you stop and disable the following services:

HP Insight NIC Agent

HP Insight Server Agent

HP Insight Storage Agent

When you disable the NIC agents it would ask you to disable the Foundation Agents, click ok, and continue.

March, 2008

Removable Storage

ISSUE: Many of the ISV Backup Applications supported by HP request or require that the RSM service be disabled. When the Windows 2003 server is rebooted, even though RSM is disabled, it will continue to initiate the Test Unit Ready (TUR) SCSI command indefinitely on all removable devices attached. This can cause issues with performance in an environment with many shared tape devices.

SCOPE: All Windows 2003 Server products that are part of an EBS installation are affected.

RESOLUTION: Please refer to Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 842411 for instructions on how to workaround this problem. Link to KB article is provided below.

Links: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c01204790&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;842411

March, 2008

Removable Storage

Go to the device manager, right click under the tape drive and select properties

On the Driver tab, select Driver Details, and check which driver is this device using

March, 2008

Removable Storage

Usual drivers should be hplto.sys, halfinch.sys (Veritas), 0dlttape.sys, etc.

Repeat the same for the Medium Changer in the device manager, hpuln32.sys or libxprmc.sys

March, 2008

Removable Storage

Now go to the Windows Registry Editor

And go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services

March, 2008

Removable Storage

Once in Services, select the folder with the name of the drivers you found for the tape drive and the robotics (hplto, halfinch-VRTS, 0dlttape, libxprmc folder).

Now make sure that the ImagePath address is pointing to the same file you just verified in the device manager.

March, 2008

Removable Storage

Once in this folder, you should have a variable called AutoRun, DWORD, with a value equal to “0”. If it is not there, add it by right clicking in the right side of the browser, select New, DWORD value and name it “AutoRun”

March, 2008

Removable Storage

The value for AutoRun will show up in the Data column. It should be set to 0x00000000 (0) and if so, you don't need to change it. If for some reason the value showed anything other than 0, right-click on AutoRun and select Modify:

March, 2008

Removable Storage

The value for AutoRun will show up in the Data column. It should be set to 0x00000000 (0) and if so, you don't need to change it. If for some reason the value showed anything other than 0, right-click on AutoRun and select Modify:

Note that after this changes

REBOOT is required for the changes to have effect

4/1/2004

HP Insight Managament Agents and RSM disabling Tape Storage Wei Jung Shih Hung July 2008.

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