User's Manual

38 Configuring FSE
• Consider supported media types (tape, disk) according to your data characteristics. Note that
duplicating (tape) media can significantly ease your vaulting policy.
• Consider your resource policies. Your system and partition policies need to be synchronized and well
balanced if you want to achieve good performance.
• Define your migration and release policies regarding the characteristics of files on each individual file
system, such as how much are the files in use, are these “working” files or files that simply need to be
retained safely, how often do you want these files to be migrated, and so on.
• Consider the effect of your policies on your FSE implementation and tune it accordingly.
Configuration basics
All FSE resources, namely FSE libraries, FSE drives, FSE media pools, FSE media, and FSE partitions, must
be configured before you can start using FSE. You can configure them using either the FSE command-line
interface or the FSE graphical user interface. For FSE configuration purposes, both user interfaces use
configuration files consisting of plain text.
When you choose the FSE command-line interface as the means of configuring FSE resources, you need to
login to the consolidated FSE system or FSE server, and invoke specific FSE commands that manipulate the
configuration files. For details on configuring FSE resources using the FSE command-line interface, see
section ”Using the FSE command-line interface for configuring resources and policies” on page 40.
When you choose the FSE graphical-user interface as the means of configuring FSE resources, you need to
start an interactive session with the FSE Management Console client, and use its GUI to configure the
required resources. For details on configuring FSE resources using the FSE graphical user interface, see
section ”Using the FSE Management Console for configuring resources and policies” on page 42.
Configuration files
The plain text file format, used for configuration files, has the following advantages:
• Simple editing and modification
To edit and modify your configuration files, you can use any tool that can save files as plain text.
• Similar syntax for each component
You configure your resources using corresponding syntax, considering the requirements of a particular
resource.
• Parsing
You can collect data from existing, already applied configuration files using parsing utilities and scripts.
• Use of comments
You can add your own comments to configuration files. Comments are introduced with a hash
character (#) in order to be marked and preserved.
FSE configuration file elements
Each configuration file consists of particular elements, which can be grouped as follows:
The following example shows the elements as they are represented in the configuration file:
Element Description
type Identification of configurable object type
header Contains version number, date of application, user name
sections Related parameters are logically grouped to sections
variables Used to set parameters
comments User comments; they are marked with a # sign
qualifiers Amount of data: KB, MB…; time units: m, h…:, percentage: %
[FSE Pool] <-------------------------------------------- type
[Version = 1] <---------------------------------------- header