I was driving to St. Louis, Missouri, the other morning and letting my mind roam to figure out what I wanted to post about. My mind gravitated to TSM management.
To give you a sense of where I am coming from, let me tell you about the environment where I used to work.
Environment
At my previous job, I managed 30+ TSM instances over several data centers with multiple instances per data center. Today I don’t manage that many TSM instances, but I use the same management techniques.
I faced a significant challenge in that there was no tool that could assist in managing so many TSM instances via the GUI or the command line. Okay, you can say there are Server Groups and Enterprise Configuration, and yes, they helped a bit (extremely great when you brought a new instance online) but not to the extent that I needed.
I was looking for several windows per instance: TSM admin windows, TSM console and a TSM mount window for any instance that had a library attached to it. So I developed a very archaic set of batch scripts that would set a background color and font color per instance. Why the different colors?
What I wanted to do was customize the title at the top of each cmd window to indicate which TSM instance I was on. This was an issue for the Console and the Mounts windows; once the banner information scrolled off you had no idea what instance that was. My thought was to open up a cmd window and change the title and then start dsmadmc but something else unexpectedly happened – the title changed to IBM Tivoli Storage Manager, overwriting my custom title.
After some reading and a call to one of my IBM Tivoli contacts, I found out that the default title IBM Tivoli Storage Manager was hardcoded into dsmadmc application and could not be changed. That’s why I used the colors.
I am very much a command line person instead of a GUI person. I enjoy having all of the options available and being able to write wrapper scripts, which I can’t do when I use the GUI. The GUI is fine if you are making an occasional update but nothing more.
Two Tools
There are two tools that I utilize consistently when managing a TSM Server. The first is
UltraEdit, a great text editor which offers a really cool feature: in column mode, UltraEdit allows you to insert text on multiple lines at that same time. Look on the UltraEdit link above to see it in action. Of course, UltraEdit offers even more features, such as integrated scripting language, Code folding, SSH/Telnet console, and FTP, for a short list of examples.
The second tool I use is Microsoft Excel; but I use it as much more than a spreadsheet. I use Excel to perform all of my data analytic, using the Format as Table, Pivot Tables, Text to Column, Conditional Formatting, and Concatenation functions along with others.
The Concatenation function is great for creating or modifying a lot of items really quickly. Place the data in its own column then create the last column for the command. Once you have the commands, all you have to do is copy and paste into your dsmadmc window.
Managing your TSM instances
After describing my management techniques and tools, I’d like to know how you work.
1. How do you manage your TSM instances?
2. Do you use the Command Line, GUI, or some other option?
3. How many TSM instances do you manage?
4.
What tools do you use?