LTO - HPE Insight and LTO Tape Drive Performance Problems. How To Disable HPE Insight.

Asset ID:	1-71-2370906.1
Update Date:	2018-03-09
Keywords:

Solution Type Technical Instruction Sure

Solution 2370906.1 : LTO - HPE Insight and LTO Tape Drive Performance Problems. How To Disable HPE Insight.

Applies to:

IBM LTO6 Tape Drive - Version All Versions and later
IBM LTO5 Tape Drive - Version All Versions and later
HP LTO6 Tape Drive - Version All Versions and later
HP LTO5 Tape Drive - Version All Versions and later
IBM LTO7 Tape Drive - Version All Versions and later
Information in this document applies to any platform.
LTO Tape drives and HPE Insight software running on host server.

Goal

To provide awareness of potential issues with HPE Insight software running on host systems accessing Oracle libraries using LTO tape drives (HP and IBM) and to provide a method to disable the HPE Agents.

Solution

This is a reprint of the HP webpage - https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c00807785

HP Systems Insight Manager Software - HP Management Agent Polling Interferes with Fibre Tape Drives During Backups

ISSUE:

HP Systems Insight Manager (HP SIM) Management Agents software is designed to poll devices to determine their status. This 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.

WORKAROUND:

For HP Insight Management Agents v 7.2 (and later) fibre tape polling can be disabled by completing the following steps:

Click HP Management Agents applet in the HPE Insight 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. Click ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp25501-26000/SP25792.EXE to access the HP utility Non-HPE site . (Note, this link will not work in the Oracle environment. We should have the customer investigate use of this tool rather than advising them to use it).

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.

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If experiencing drive performance issues on LTO drives (HP and IBM) please make sure you ask the customer if they are running HPE Insight software.

N.b. Use of this software is usually flagged in the .lzt output file in HP LTO tape drive dumps and Drive Assessments.

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