I work on a Netbackup 5.0MP6 Windows Master Server and sometimes on clients the drives fill up with VSP tmp files. They use every single bit of space and the official fix from Veritas is to reboot the server and then delete the files. Not a very good solution if you have any kind of real server environment. Here is how you can get around that.
The symptoms: Symantec Netbackup creates tmp files on the root drives to backup open files on Windows clients, these are suppose to be deleted after the backup but they often do not ending up filling the drives to capacity. They look like these files.
_vxfiVspCacheFile_1.tmp
_vxfiVspCacheFile_2.tmp
_vxfiVspCacheFile_0.tmp
The cause: Virus scanners, including Symantec's own Norton antivirus puts locks on the VSP (Veritas open file backup) tmp files and they do not get deleted. The only sure fire way to delete them is to reboot the server.
The solution: I have heard this does not always work but I've never had a problem with it on Windows 2000 or 2003 servers. We can use a little program called Process Explorer from Microsoft (System Internals) to unlock the file and delete it. First stop your antivirus from its' real time scanning. Then start up Process Explorer and put in the Vsp tmp file name that shows up on your drives (they could be hidden). Process Explorer will fine the handle locking them and you can right click and close the handle locking these files. I recommend that you try Process Explorer on something else first if you've never used it since you can close any handle and blue screen your box if you don't know what you are doing. Once the handle is closed, you can delete the tmp files, turn antivirus back on and pick up your fat raise... yeah right.
Now how do we prevent it? No good way really, turn off virus scanner? yeah right. Turn off open file backups in VSP? If you don't need it. Don't use Netbackup, haha. With Windows 2003 you can use VSS (Windows built in Volume Shadow Copy Service or Volume Snapshot Service or VSS... Microsoft...) in the newer version of Netbackup (6.5 for sure) but I haven't tried this yet. Maybe it will work better since VSS lets you set max amount of disk space to use.
Links: I used the following in my original search to solve this problem.
MCSE forums
Bob's Blog
Download Process Explorer
2 comments:
I use 6.0, it allows you to size limit of the vsp files, not sure about the version you're running
5.0mp6, even with size limits it will eventually create a bunch of them since it can't reuse the old locked ones and fill up the drive.
Post a Comment