Administrator's Guide


Defining and Managing Drives

Administrators can define, query, update, and delete drives.

Defining Drives


Task Required Privilege Class
Define drives System or unrestricted storage

To inform the server about a drive that can be used to access storage volumes, issue the DEFINE DRIVE command. When issuing this command, you must provide some or all of the following information:

Library name
The name of the library in which the drive resides.

Drive name
The name assigned to the drive.

Device name
The device name to be used to access the drive.

Element address
The element address of the drive. The ELEMENT parameter applies only to SCSI libraries. The element address is a number that indicates the physical location of a drive within an automated library. ADSM needs the element address to connect the physical location of the drive to the drive's SCSI address.

For example, to define a drive that belongs to the manual library named MANLIB, enter this command:

define drive manlib tapedrv3 device=/dev/mt3

Requesting Information about Drives


Task Required Privilege Class
Request information about drives Any administrator

You can request information about drives by using the QUERY DRIVE command. This command accepts wildcard characters for both a library name and a drive name. See ADSM Administrator's Reference for information about using wildcard characters.

For example, to query all drives associated with your server, enter the following command:

query drive

The following shows an example of the output from this command.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Library   Drive    Device     Device     On Line                                |
|Name      Name     Type                                                         |
|--------  -------  ---------  --------   -------                                |
|MANLIB    8MM.0    8MM        /dev/mt1   Yes                                    |
|AUTOLIB   8MM.2    8MM        /dev/mt2   Yes                                    |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Updating Drives


Task Required Privilege Class
Update drives System or unrestricted storage

You can change the attributes of a drive by issuing the UPDATE DRIVE command. You can change whether the drive is online or offline. You can also change the device name if you are reconfiguring your system. If the drive resides in a SCSI library, its ELEMENT attribute can be updated.

You can change a drive to offline status while the drive is in use. ADSM will finish with the current tape in the drive, and then not use the drive anymore. By changing a drive to offline, you can drain work off of a drive. However, if the tape that had been in use was part of a series of tapes for a single transaction, the drive will not be available to complete the series. If no other drives are available, the transaction may fail. If all drives in a library are made offline, any attempts by ADSM to write to the storage pool associated with the library will fail.

The device name or element number for a drive cannot be updated if it is currently in use. If a drive has a volume mounted, but the volume is currently idle, it can be explicitly dismounted as described in "Dismounting an Idle Volume". For example, suppose you have a drive DRIVE3 and you want to change the element address to 119. Enter the following command:

update drive auto drive3 element=119

Deleting Drives


Task Required Privilege Class
Delete drives System or unrestricted storage

A drive cannot be deleted if it is currently in use. If a drive has a volume mounted, but the volume is currently idle, it can be explicitly dismounted as described in "Dismounting an Idle Volume".
Note:A library cannot be deleted until all of the drives defined within it are deleted.


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