Disabling Tape Storage in HP Insight Management Agents

1. HP Insight Managament Agents and RSM disablingTape StorageWei Jung Shih HungJuly 2008

2. 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

3. HP Insight Management Agents 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.

4. HP Insight Management Agents 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.

5. 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

6. 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.

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. Removable Storage Now go to the Windows Registry Editor And go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services

11. 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.

12. 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”

13. 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:

14. 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