NetVault SmartDisk 11.4.5 - Administration Guide

Backup stalls while writing to NetVault Backup-related media

When a backup job stalls, it indicates either that the product is not licensed or that NetVault SmartDisk has exceeded the licensed capacity. You know that a stall has occurred when the Job Status page indicates that the backup job is “Running: (Stalled) Writing to media” or “Running: (Stalled) Storing backup index.” You can also check the status by locating the applicable NetVault SmartDisk Instance on the Manage Devices page and clicking the corresponding Manage Device icon; doing so displays a status of either “UNLICENSED” or “LICENSE EXCEEDED” for the selected instance.

If the product is not licensed, request the applicable license; for more information, see the Quest NetVault SmartDisk Installation/Upgrade Guide. If the instance is full, review the following information.

At the start of a write, the NetVault SmartDisk Disk Manager verifies that there is still sufficient NetVault SmartDisk Licensed Capacity to proceed, that is, that the Licensed Capacity exceeds the current amount of protected data. If there is Licensed Capacity available, the write continues to completion. Writes to NetVault SmartDisk are performed in X-sized units, where X is equal to the reservation-size parameter described in Extending NetVault SmartDisk Storage Pools. During the write, the Disk Manager performs a verify after each X byte is written to determine whether there is enough usable space available to reserve an additional X byte. A write stalls if there is no Licensed Capacity at the start of the write, or if at any point during the write there is not enough available space to reserve X bytes.

For information about increasing the NetVault SmartDisk Licensed Capacity, see the Quest NetVault SmartDisk Installation/Upgrade Guide.

NetVault SmartDisk compatibility with McAfee VirusScan

If you install NetVault SmartDisk on a Windows system that also runs McAfee VirusScan Enterprise, problems might occur during data transfers between your backup software and NetVault SmartDisk. For example, you might see a “Failed SQL insert into log table” or “2570 0 disk I/O error” message.

If problems do occur, Quest recommends that you implement one of the following workarounds:

CSD stops responding and backups fail on Windows 32-bit systems

The NetVault SmartDisk CSD supports a Chunk Store of between 1.8 TB and 2.5 TB on Windows 32-bit systems, depending on the version of Windows. If this limit is reached, that is, the system runs out of memory, an assert occurs and NetVault SmartDisk is shut down. To allow NetVault SmartDisk to restart, backups to be retired, and Garbage Collection to make space available in the Chunk Store, edit the smartdisk.cfg file to disable deduplication, and enable it again after sufficient space has been cleared in the Chunk Store.

IMPORTANT: If you intend to use deduplication, Quest recommends that you use the 64-bit (Pure64) versions of NetVault SmartDisk instead of the 32-bit or Hybrid versions whenever possible. Deduplication is memory-intensive; 32-bit memory allocation is limited, and capacity varies by OS and by usage.

Backups fail with "Stream has gone down" Message on Windows systems

If the Store volume path and Staging volume path that you specify for NetVault SmartDisk are network shares, you might encounter an error similar to the following if a significant load is placed on the share:

To avoid this error, adjust the timeout value of the SessTimeout parameter in the Windows Registry. Modify the following registry key:

Set the timeout value to 300 seconds (5 minutes).

For more information, see the following: