Hello, Thank you for your feature request. Each Volume that is mounted by Bacula must be on a different device, and adding those devices to the Storage daemon is really a quite trivial job.
In a normal Bacula Storage daemon, you probably would never have more than 10 devices total (some very large installations may be the exception). Consequently, I cannot see the utility of this request. If you are using more than 10 devices in a Storage daemon, you are probably doing something wrong. Implementing this feature, as I understand it, would create a number of problems such as making it impossible to do things like mount and unmount of volumes or labeling them, because within the current Bacula structure you need a unique device name. There are at least three different ways to conveniently read/write to multiple Volumes: 1. Use multiple separately defined SD Devices 2. Use multiple Devices controled by a disk autochanger script (there are several of these scripts available, including one from the project). 3. Use a Bacula Virtual Disk Autochanger where no autochanger script is needed. All the above methods work well and many *very* large sites use these techniques. In addition, one should take care in using multipe disk Devices that write to the same physical disk drive. Depending how you set it up and how many you have, you may create severe disk fragmentation and performance problems. Bottom line: This feature request would add no new functionality, and Bacula already has quite adequate means to do what you want to do. So I am sorry, this feature is not something that we will implement. Thanks for using Bacula. Best regards, Kern On Sunday 28 March 2010 19:00:06 Silver Salonen wrote: > It seems this message hasn't made it to bacula-devel, so I'm sending it > again.. > > > Item: Allow writing to multiple volumes concurrently on file-type devices > Origin: Silver Salonen (sil...@ultrasoft.ee) > Date: 15.Mar.2010 > Status: > > What: Currently Bacula allows only one volume to be written per device. For > file-type devices (eg. HDD) it would make sense to allow writing multiple > files/volumes concurrently. > > Why: For file-type devices it makes the most sense (at least to me) to use > one job per volume (file) to get the best overview of the existing jobs, to > rotate them and manage them in any other way. When using this type of > configuration, currently one needs as many Bacula devices as many jobs one > wishes to run concurrently. Or virtual changer has to be used. Allowing > writing multiple volumes concurrently would let the configuration be > simpler and more optimized. > > Notes: For backwards-compatibility it would make sense to add a new > option > for the limit (eg. "Maximum concurrent volumes"?) and set it to 1 by > default. The limit would also need "Random Access = yes". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-devel mailing list Bacula-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel
