Configuring Libraries and Tape Drives on Windows: Overview

This section assumes that your Windows system uses libraries and tape drives that need to be configured for use with Oracle Secure Backup. This section describes how to perform the following tasks:

Establish your administrative domain so that media servers can be associated with their attached devices.

"Configuring an Administrative Domain on Windows: Overview" describes how to perform this task.
Assign user-defined names to your devices (optional).

"Assigning Oracle Secure Backup Device Names on Windows" describes how to perform this task.
Inventory your devices.

"Taking Inventory of Tape Devices on Windows" describes how to perform this task.
Configure Network Attached Storage (NAS) tape drives and libraries, if any.

"Configuring NAS Libraries and Tape Drives on Windows" describes how to perform this task.

Before proceeding to these tasks, review the conceptual information in the following sections:

About Oracle Secure Backup Logical Unit Numbers
About Fibre Channel Shared Devices

About Oracle Secure Backup Logical Unit Numbers

In addition to obtaining SCSI device information, each tape drive or tape library is assigned an Oracle Secure Backup logical unit number during the configuration process. This number, which must be between 0 and 31, is used to generate unique device names during device configuration. On Windows, Oracle Secure Backup logical unit numbers are assigned by the Oracle Secure Backup device driver. Values for devices of each type (library or tape drive) are assigned sequentially, starting from 0, and this number is used as part of the device name. Tape libraries are thus named obl0, obl1, obl2 and so on. Tape drives are named similarly, obt0, obt1, obt2 and so on.

Note:

The Oracle Secure Backup logical unit number should not be confused with the SCSI logical unit number (SCSI LUN). The SCSI LUN is part of the hardware address of the device, while the Oracle Secure Backup logical unit number is part of the device special file name.
In the device name for tape libraries, the character l is a lower-case L, not a number 1.

About Fibre Channel Shared Devices

Unlike SCSI, which is a host-centric protocol, Fibre Channel is a storage architecture alternative in which tape libraries and tape drives are typically shared among multiple Oracle Secure Backup media servers. A Fibre Channel-attached tape drive or library often has multiple attachments, one for each host that can directly access it. You can use the chdev command in obtool to attach the same device to multiple hosts on a network.

Oracle Secure Backup can automatically arbitrate usage of shared devices so that no two users attempt to access a device independently of one another.

You configure Fibre Channel devices on Oracle Secure Backup in the same way that you configure SCSI and NAS devices.