Administrator's Guide

Automating Client Operations

You can automate operations such as backup for the ADSM clients. You can perform the operations immediately or schedule them to occur at regular intervals. Figure 8 shows the ADSM objects that may be involved in automated client operations. The key objects that interact are:

Include-exclude list (file for UNIX clients) on each ADSM client

Determines which files are backed up or space-managed, and determines management classes for files

Management class

Determines where client files are stored and how they are managed

Schedule

Determines when client operations such as backup occur

Association defined between client and schedule

Determines which schedules are run for a client

The client can specify a management class for a file or set of files, or can use the default management class for the policy domain. The client specifies a management class by using an INCLUDE option in the client's include-exclude list or file. (See (A) in Figure 8.) You can have central control of client options such as INCLUDE and EXCLUDE by defining client option sets on the server. When you register a client, you can specify a client option set for that client to use. See "Defining Client Options from the Server" for details.

The management class contains information that determines how ADSM handles files that clients backup, archive, or migrate. For example, the management class contains the backup copy group and the archive copy group. Each copy group points to a destination, a storage pool where files are stored when they are backed up or archived. (See (E) in Figure 8.)

Clients are assigned to a policy domain when they are registered. Schedules that can automate client operations are also associated with a policy domain. (See (C) in Figure 8.) To automate client operations, you define schedules for a domain. Then you define associations between schedules and clients in the same domain. (See (B) in Figure 8.)

For a schedule to work on a particular client, the client machine must be turned on and must be running the client scheduler.

The scheduled client operations are called events. ADSM stores information about events in the ADSM database. (See (D) in Figure 8.) For example, you can query the server to determine which scheduled events completed successfully and which failed.

For how to set up policy domains and management classes, see Chapter 12. "Managing Client Data Using Policies". For more details on how to automate client operations, see Chapter 13. "Automating Client Operations".

Figure 8. Automating Client Operations