Space management with multiple media

[jwood.ok]

Pardon my ignorance on this, I wasn't working with physical security when all this was set up.

Looking at our overview in VSOM (we are still on 6.3.2 - an upgrade is pending). Some of our media servers have 1 media (/media1) listed, while some of ours list three (/media0, /media1, /media 2).

I'm not certain what the difference is in how these are set up, but on a couple that are set up this way, one media is lower on free space than the others.  Is there a way to move feeds to go to the other media?  I'm guessing they may initially be set up one way and may need to be manually moved, but wasn't certain.

Here is an example:

[mcwalter · Accepted solution]

Hi John,

You cannot move the media files but you can change where the camera archive saves going forward. This should help with space on the oversubscribed partition.

1. Call CiscoTAC and get the chloc.zip file

2. sftp the chloc.zip to the media server temp file

3. find a file location of one of the archives you want to move (ex. /media2/1051)

4. stop cisco services on server

5. run the change location command (ex. sh chloc.sh 1051 /media1)

6. restart cisco services

7. verify archives are saving to newly specified media partition.

Good luck.

M

[jwood.ok]

Thank you mcwalkter.  I am curious, how are these set up initially? Are the feeds evenly distributed and then they just get out of whack based on resolution, frame rate, etc?

[bmathesw]

chloc doesnt work for VSM 6.3.2. It's only for VSM 7 and up.

When an archive is started, it looks for the media partition with most available space at that moment and starts archiving to that partition.

So, if you were to stop some archives and re-create it, it will be picked up on the empty media partition.

Hope that helps!

[jwood.ok]

Thank you.  We are planning on upgrading shortly but I considering looking into fixing these issues.  I suppose there is no way to tell how much of an archive may be cutting off? For instance if you are wanting 30 days, it may only be 1 day that isn't fitting.

[mcwalter]

I used chloc on a VSM63 installation this summer. I dont remember if it was before or after we took them to 6.3.3. As I said I recommend getting CiscoTAC to support you.

[Scott Olsen]

Hey John,

VSMS usually does a decent job at allocating storage between the repos, but we've had a couple occassions where one of more cameras which, although supposedely configured identically to their counterparts, were actually streaming (and archiving) at a much higher bitrate than what was anticipated or planned for. 

It might be worth check the "View complete details of all archives" on the VSMS server in question via the VSMC console on said server...

If you're not familiar with these pages, you'll get some pretty decent detail about each archive on the box.  Example:

Archive Name          : a_p_Front_Corner_PTZ_-_a_Front_Corner
Archive Status          : RUNNING
Storage Path          : /media0/1012
Archive Type          : loop
Archive Duration    : 604800 seconds
Archive Media          : mpeg4-v
Video Width           : 704
Video Height          : 480
Video Quality          : 50
Video Framerate         : 5.000000 fps
Video Bitrate          : 1500
Archive Expiry          : 0 days
Archive Size          : 136828456 Kbytes
Archive Storage Est : 136828456 Kbytes
Archive Start Time  : Wed Nov 13 17:13:47 2013
Archive End Time    : Wed Nov 20 17:24:09 2013
Event Archive         : NO
Recording Rate          : 2.066503 Mbps
Max Fps              : 15.286242
Max Frame Size          : 121366 bytes
Current Duration    : 605422 seconds
Current Retention   : 100%

Check out the Archive Size reported for each, just to be sure.  You may have a rogue archiver chewing up an unexpected amount of disk.

Cheers!

[jwood.ok]

Thank you Scott, that is some helpful information.  In my case it isn't showing me anything too odd, but nice to know!