The following are good practices for media pools (formerly known as volume pools):

• Configure a scratch pool for management of scratch tapes. If a scratch pool exists, EMM can move volumes from that pool to other pools that do not have volumes available.

• Use the available_media script in the goodies directory. You can put the available_media report into a script. The script redirects the report output to a file and emails the file to the administrators daily or weekly. The script helps track the tapes that are full, frozen, suspended, and so on. By means of a script, you can also filter the output of the available_media report to generate custom reports.

  To monitor media, you can also use the Veritas OpsCenter or Veritas APTARE. For instance, either one can issue an alert based on the number of media available or the percent of media that are frozen or suspended.

• Use the none pool for cleaning tapes.

• Do not create more pools than you need. In most cases, you need only 6 to 8 pools. The pools include a global scratch pool, catalog backup pool, and the default pools that are created by the installation. The existence of too many pools causes the library capacity to become fragmented across the pools. Consequently, the library becomes filled with many tapes that are partially full.