When Backup Exec is installed, the All Drives (<Server Name>) is created by default. In a non-shared storage environment, this default drive pool contains the server's locally attached drives. In a shared environment, this default drive pool is created for each server using the SAN Shared Storage Option, and contains both locally attached and shared devices.

Symantec recommends creating a shared storage drive pool, which contains only shared devices.

See Creating device pools.

You can create other drive pools to meet your particular requirements. For example, you may want to create a drive pool for high-performance drives and create a second drive pool for lower-performance drives. High-priority jobs can then be sent to the high-performance drive pool for faster completion.

Drives can belong to more than one drive pool, and drive pools can contain different types of drives. In the shared storage environment, drive pools can contain both local and shared drives, but jobs will run only on those drives in the pool to which the server has access.

For example, suppose you create a drive pool that contains the local drives for both media server A and media server B. If a job is submitted at media server B to this drive pool, the job will run only on available drives attached to server B. If all of server B's drives are in use, the job has to wait for a drive on server B to become available. If a job was submitted from server B to a drive pool that contained both its local and shared devices, the job would run on the first available drive.

The steps for creating and deleting drive pools, adding or deleting drives from a drive pool, and setting priorities for drives in a drive pool are the same in a shared storage environment as in a non-shared storage environment.