Troubleshooting › SAN Configuration Problems › Shared IBM Devices Appear as Unavailable or Offline

Shared IBM Devices Appear as Unavailable or Offline

Valid on Windows platforms.

Symptom

The shared IBM tape devices on SAN-attached Member servers are marked as unavailable or offline.

If you have IBM Ultrium/LTO tape drives, in some cases the IBM LTO Tape driver (Windows Server 2003) will issue a SCSI Reserve command to the tape devices when the Arcserve Backup Primary server opens the devices. This is not a problem for the Primary server, but when the SAN-attached Member server tries to access these tape devices it will fail and the devices will not be usable from that server.

Solution

In the Arcserve Backup Activity log for the Member server, you may see SCSI Port errors when the Arcserve Backup Tape Engine service is started and tries to access these drives.

You can configure the IBM tape driver to not issue the SCSI Reserve command by performing the following registry procedure.

1. In the registry editor, access the registry key:

   \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\
   

2. If the IBMtape driver is installed, search under the services key for a key name that is equal to the file name of the IBMtape driver.

   For example, if the file name of the IBMtape driver ibmtp2k3.sys, the key name is ibmtp2k3.

   Select the key, add a DWORD value named "DisableReserveUponOpen," and set it to 1.

3. Exit registry editor and reboot the server.