Question about multiple tape drives

[veremin]

Even though you've selected both "always continue current mediaset" and "never overwrite" options, data gets constantly overwritten, instead of being appended, right? If so, the described behavior looks unexpected, and you'd better open a case regarding this with our support team. (you can make a reference to this thread).

Thanks.

[gbeajmn]

Just wanted to add myself into this thread as I also want this feature.

We have 12 vm's being backed up, around 2.5TB of data in total going to two separate LTO-5 tape drives.
Backup Exec 2012 does this perfectly, allowing 1 tape to fill up and then automatically rolling over to the next drive / tape.

I really hope this feature gets added at some point, since for now we have to use Backup Exec to backup to tape - I really don't want to have to keep using Backup Exec..!

I guess it will be mostly smaller sites that need this feature, as larger ones will have tape libraries I expect.
We have never seen the need to buy a library when we only use two tapes per night - it was much cheaper just to buy two separate drives.

[veremin]

For now the best way to utilize both drives simultaneously is to create multiple tape jobs and point them to different tape devices. Your voice is counted, though. Thanks for the feedback.

[dlieshout@client.nl]

Please add me, and a lot of customers, also to the list for this feature to make it work (as it works in any other backup-software). Please Veeam, we know yu can't understand why we would have tape-backups, but we need it.

[fredbloggs]

and me, i'd like media pools to span drives (though exclusions is higher up the priority list).
Having to create separate jobs to use different media pools means potential wastage of tape capacity and management overhead to try and split things up in a meaningful manner.

[Gostev]

This feature is in the works.

[wbauer84]

We really would also need this feature.
We have one VM (file server) with 2.7 TByte data, and not able to back it up with one tape on a single LTO-6 tape, even with compression/deduplication.
But the customer has (historically) two LTO-6 drives, worth around EUR 3.000,--
So dropping them away and buy a tape library cannot be the solutions for all Veeam customers haveing this circumstances.
By the way, there is in the moment even NO possibility to set up a time, how long the tape job waits for the next tape, before he cancel the job. In the moment in Veeam 8.0 it seems to be like 5-10 minutes....

[Dima P.]

Hello Wolfgang,
Thank you for sharing your scenario! As it was mentioned above this feature is in discussions, so your vote and details on this request are highly appreciated. There is no ETA on this feature.

how long the tape job waits for the next tape, before he cancel the job. In the moment in Veeam 8.0 it seems to be like 5-10 minutes....

If I am not mistaken the default timeout for waiting tape session was set to 72 hours, and can be changed with a regkey. Your behavior looks unexpected and it might be useful to check it with the support team. Additionally the hardcoded email notification for such cases will be added in the upcoming patch for VBR. Thank you

[veremin]

How long the tape job waits for the next tape, before he cancel the job?

The first patch that added email notifications for such cases has been just released; please, take a look. Thanks.

[Jdeagrela]

Hi

Please add me as well, this is a critical feature, we have many distributed data centres with two standalone tape drives (LTO4's), and huge file servers and the backups for the single vm wont fit on one tape, couple with staff availability to change tapes when needed. all we need to be able to do is add the two drives to one media pool and when the tape in drive 0 is full run over to the tape in drive 1.

Regards.
Jonathan.

[pizzim13]

I am also looking for a similar feature. One of things that our current tape software has that Veeam does not are media pools / tape pools that encompass tapes/drives from separate libraries. For example, we have 16 Dell TL4000’s with 46 tape slots /32 drives. In our current tape software I can add all tape resources to one pool to allow a tape job to run on any place resources are available. Where we run into this scenario often is when a tape library runs out of free tape to start/complete a job, it will just start/resume somewhere else in the pool.
In Veeam, all tape resources are islands. Because of that a tape job is bound to the confines of that pool. If no tape/drives are available the job will wait until resource of that pool becomes free instead of just moving to an available tape library.
I was thinking of writing my own tape job loader balancer. Creating jobs dynamically before a tape run so their resource consumption is never greater than resources available than any one tape library. I would hold off on doing this if Veeam was adding this feature in the short term.

[Dima P.]

Hello guys,
Thanks for your describing your cases and explaining your ideas. We are exploring the possibilities to provide you such functionality. Stay tuned.

[NKROE]

Please add me. We are need this Feature too.

[Kemie]

Please add me to the list.

I also have this problem.

[B2r2]

Please add me to this list also.

Backup to tape fail-over needed here also i.e, Backup to tape Drive 1 (When the tape is full) - Backup to Tape Drive 2 = one backup job on 2 tapes from 2 different tape drives.

[Dima P.]

Hi guys,

I am not sure I understand your requests since tape library failover and parallel processing were introduced in v9. Can you please elaborate? Thanks.