Purpose

This document describes how you can the ARCserve Job Scheduler Wizard to run command line utilities to automate device management.

Scope

Information in this document relates to:

BrightStor ARCserve Backup r11.0, r11.1, and r11.5 for Windows

Introduction

The Job Scheduler Wizard provides an alternative to manually entering command line utilities in a Command Prompt window. Some advantages of using the Job Scheduler Wizard:

• Jobs can be set to run at a specific time, and if required, set to repeat.
  
• Jobs appear in the ARCserve Job Queue, and write to the ARCserve activity log.
  
• Jobs can be stopped in the Job Queue.
  
• Commands specified are not limited to the ARCserve command line utilities.
  
• Device management commands cannot be run in pre or post job scripts as device groups are locked when the backup job is invoked. You can schedule these device management commands using the Job Scheduler Wizard instead.

Pre-requisites

• BrightStor ARCserve Backup for Windows Host Server installation.
  
• Administrator rights on the local machine are required to submit jobs using the Job Scheduler Wizard.

Accessing the Job Scheduler Wizard

This can be accessed from either:

1. The Windows Start menu:
   
   
   
   
2. The 'Wizards' section of the Navigation Bar or menu bar:
   
   

Invoking the wizard from either of these places will bring up a screen similar to the one below:

Click on Next to continue, and you will be presented with the following screen:

If click on the arrow in the 'Run this program' dialog box we will be presented with a pre-defined list of all of the ARCserve command line utilities to select from:

We're going to look at a very simple example of scheduling the erase of a tape in a single tape drive.

From the drop down list, we select the ca_devmgr -erase option:

When we select this, an example of the parameters that can be used are displayed, this has been highlighted in a red box in the screenshot above.

For most device management commands we need to know the following information:

• Adapter/Board Number
  
• SCSI ID
  
• LUN

There are several ways to find out this information, but probably the easiest is to open up the ARCserve device management and highlight the device you require information about:

This information is highlighted in a red box in the screenshot above. We can see the following information:

OK, now that we have this information we can add it to the parameters for the job:

We now see some other information at the end of the example which we're not familiar with. Clicking on help brings up context sensitive help on the command we have selected:

We can see that q = Quick erase, qz = Quick-erase plus, and l=Long Erase. In this example we're going to use Quick-erase plus, so we're going to add qz to the list of command line parameters:

At this stage we have completed the command line and parameters required, so click on Next to continue to the next stage:

We now need to provide the security credentials necessary to run the command as.

The information provided here relates to Windows (not BrightStor) security, and the account specified must have local Administrator rights on the machine. Enter the required information and click Next to continue:

We are now asked what schedule we'd like the command to run to:

As this is the first time we're running this command we should make sure the syntax and security is correct, and try a 'Run now' job.

Before continuing ensure that a blank or other tape suitable for running an erase is in the drive. Remember you will lose all data on the tape even though this is just a test. Click Next to continue when you are ready:

You are presented with a summary of the job you created, and have the opportunity to add a description. This description will appear alongside the job when submitted to the Job Queue. When you have checked the information, click Submit to send the job to the job queue:

A pop up windows should indicate that the job was successfully submitted to the job queue. Press OK to continue. You can then press cancel at this stage to close the Job Scheduler Wizard GUI.

Let's open up the ARCserve Manager and go to the Job status screen and see what the result of the job was:

We can see from the screenshot that the job appears to have finished ok, and you can identify it easily by the description we gave it when we submitted it 'My test erase job'.

Let's take a look at the activity log and see what information was written:

We can see that the job was submitted to the queue, it ran, and was successful.

If the job was not successful information regarding the failure would be shown in the log.

Ok, so our test was successful, and now we want to set up the job so it runs Monday to Friday at 14:00 so it erases the tape in the drive well in advance of the nightly backup job which runs at 18:00. Follow the steps above again until you get to the schedule screen, where this time we're going to set the repeating job up:

You can see from the screenshot above that selecting the 'Schedule' radio button opens up the schedule options.

In this case we have already set the date, and the time we want the backup to run. We next want to select the repeat method. Click on the arrow next to this box to display a list of available options. For our specific job, we're going to select the 'Day(s) of Week':

Click on Next to continue, and you will see the summary of the information you've provided:

Click on 'Submit' to send the new generic job to the queue.

The generic job should appear in the job queue and run as you specified.