TMF Planning and Configuration Guide (H06.05+)

Doing an Initial Configuration

HP NonStop TMF Planning and Configuration Guide—540136-002

2-5

Preparing the TMF Catalog

To prepare the TMF catalog for receiving audit dumps and online dumps, you must add

labeled scratch tapes. You do this by issuing a series of ADD TAPEMEDIA commands

with the STATUS option set to SCRATCH. At least initially, you will probably want to

add multiple scratch tapes by way of a single command.

How Many Tapes?

By default, the TMF catalog maintains three generations of each file dumped in online

dumps. In planning your tape storage requirements, however, you should calculate the

number of required tapes based on four generations of dumped files, because the

oldest dumped files are not released until a new generation actually exists. Note that a

particular online dump is not released until all the files in that dump are released.

Audit dumps remain in the TMF catalog until they are no longer needed for volume or

file recovery. The TMF catalog process automatically releases an audit dump when

the last online dump it pertains to is released.

Therefore, the TMF catalog must ultimately include:

•

Enough tapes to accommodate four generations of all files you will be dumping on

a regular basis

•

Enough tapes to accommodate the configured number of copies of all audit dumps

that apply to the active online dumps. The default is one copy per audit dump, but

up to three copies per audit dump is allowed.

When and How Often to Dump?

If you need to do file recovery, it is extremely important to do online dumps of all

database tables and files as soon as possible after initial configuration. For detailed

information about making online dumps, refer to the TMF Operations and Recovery

Guide.

To make file recovery most efficient, we recommend that you make online dumps of all

your database tables and files at least weekly and that you do so on a volume-by-

volume basis. For example, if you have 20 data volumes, you could dump four per

day, Monday through Friday, using DUMP FILES commands:

TMF 30> DUMP FILES $DATA1.*.*

TMF 31> DUMP FILES $DATA2.*.*

TMF 32> DUMP FILES $DATA3.*.*

If you dump all your data volumes each week, you should have enough labeled scratch

tapes in the TMF catalog to accommodate three weeks’ worth (in this case, three

generations) of audit dumps.