AIX

I have 2 LPARs running AIX 5.3. Both are on the same VLAN. One LPAR, which I'll call LPAR2, has a 4mm SCSI tape drive connected to it, while LPAR1 does not have a tape drive connected. I am able to take mksysb backups of LPAR2 to the tape drive since it's directly connected. However, I need to take mksysb backups of LPAR1 to the same tape drive without having to disconnect it from LPAR2. Is there a way to remote mount the tape drive to LPAR1?

I'm wondering if there's a way to share the tape drive using NFS. And if not, what methods are available for doing this? I know it can be done, I've seen it, but they were using a third party backup utility (Sysback) to pull it off.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

You will still be stuck the day you want to use the tape since you have no drive...
Why not use a NIM server with repository of your mksysb image image files?

Hi vbe. Thanks for the reply. That's a good point. In order to do a restore I'd have to connect the tape drive directly to LPAR1 so I can boot from the image on tape. That sucks, but the good news is that this is a temporary backup solution until we reach our goal of using TSM. Basically, I figured this tape drive would be the fastest temporary solution.

Once we purchase Sysback (which is very soon) we will use Sysback to send image backups to our TSM tape library. We will also have a server with Sysback installed and configured with a list of network boot clients. We'll then be able to boot off the "Sysback server" and restore the LPARs from TSM.