Using multiple drives parallel

[PatrickS1]

Hello everyone

If I have two or more tape drives but only a single job it will only use a single drive?
To speed things up I would need to create multiple job so that each job can use one drive?
I just wanted confirmation on this. I guess it is not possible that a single Job is able control multiple drives in parallel?

Regards
Patrick

[veremin]

If I have two or more tape drives but only a single job it will only use a single drive?

Correct.

To speed things up I would need to create multiple job so that each job can use one drive?

Multiple jobs pointed to different media pools.

I guess it is not possible that a single Job is able control multiple drives in parallel?

Correct.

Thanks.

[cookiejc]

Hi, I've seen some older posts on this but thought i'd ask in case anything's changed.

We are configuring tape backups using Veeam Enterprise Plus for one of our isolated environments. We have configured 4 media pools (Week 1 to 3 and a monthly pool) and a tape backup job which backs up multiple Veeam jobs. I was hoping when the tape backup job kicked off it would process more than one Veeam backup job at once and use multiple drives (We have a 4 x LTO5 drive library) but it is only using one

Is there a way to set Veeam to process the other jobs within the same Tape job using multiple drives?

many thanks,

[veremin]

Is there a way to set Veeam to process the other jobs within the same Tape job using multiple drives?

Currently, not. The feature is on our radar, though.

[cookiejc]

Thanks for the quick response. Can you advise what is best practice then in order to fully utilize all four drives?

[veremin]

Combination of different media pools (one per drive) and different backup to tape jobs pointed to them. Thanks.

[cookiejc]

Ok, thanks... setting up this environment was in part a trial of using the enterprise plus features on a smaller scale before we look at the expense of purchasing / implementing on our main environment (100+ sockets)

The main environment has 2 z 16 drive tape libraries. Having a media pool and job per drive doesn't really sound like a scalable enterprise solution unless I'm missing something?

[Dima P.]

The main environment has 2 z 16 drive tape libraries. Having a media pool and job per drive doesn't really sound like a scalable enterprise solution unless I'm missing something?

Unfortunately, that’s the way it works in the current implementation, but we are going to improve in one of the next major releases for sure.

[cookiejc]

That is really unfortunate. I like Veeam BR a lot and have been pushing for expanding it's use in our organization but having now purchased an Enterprise license I am disappointed to discover that it is so limited in enterprise features. I guess this is something to take up with our account manager rather than on these forums

Do you have any timescales for implementing better support for multiple drives / libraries?

[veremin]

No ETA at the moment. We can only say that we do consider improving the current implementation in future.