Fiber Tape Drive Dilemma

[sitruk]

Alright. I understand that this question may be ridiculous, but I figured I would go straight to where all the smart people are to get an answer.

Our situation:

We are about to migrate to Veeam from Symantec BackupExec and our current backup server (physical) is running Win2008R2 with an HP tape library directly attached via Fiber. The tape library is fiber only hence the need for the physical server. We backup to an HP StoreOnce then copy that to Tape. We would like to upgrade the current backup server to ensure Veeam is not held back due to incompatibilities with the OS version. However, we are unable to decommission Backupexec due to our retention policies and we do not want to perform an in-place upgrade of the OS because that would be asking for issues. Recap: Physical server is required to talk to the fiber tape library and we cannot reinstall the OS due to policies requiring access to old backup software.

Now stay with me here.... Is it possible to set up Veeam on the current physical server in order to "host" the tape library as a repository for the copy jobs and then install another copy of Veeam on a fresh VM with Server 2016 to perform all the backup tasks?

If that isn't possible, does anyone have any other ideas that might help us through this dilemma?

Thank you for your time.

[SlimAces]

We had a similar situation. Tape drives attached Backup Exec 2008 R2 server, got tired of their poor support switched to Veeam. What I did was:

1. Backed up the Catalog and Data folders on BE server in this KB article from BE: https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/a ... TECH129826
2. Blew away Backup Exec server and installed 2012 R2
3. Installed Veeam, attached Qnap repository, installed non-exclusive drivers for our IBM tape drives added tape drive/library to Veeam
4. Installed Backup Exec on same server and used the steps in the KB article to move the Catalog and Data folders to new server so the new install of BE would have all the old servers Catelogs for the data we backed up to tape via BE.

Once the steps in the KB article are completed, verify your catalogs are still intact from the old server. Put all jobs on hold and shut off the BE services until if and when BE is needed to restore data from those BE tapes. We didn't have to change drivers for the tape drive to use the tape drive with BE. Just make sure no Veeam tape jobs are running when if and when you attempt to restore from BE tapes. We have successfully restore data for our file servers using old BE tapes using this method.

[Regnor]

You don't need to install Veeam on the Physical Server in order to use the library or storeonce for your backups.
Run Veeam as a virtual machine and install a tape and repository server on the physical machine; just be sure to stop all Backup Exec services as those could block access to the library.

[sitruk]

Thank you for your replies. We actually just installed Veeam on the current backup server just to see and it actually has the option to connect to a tape library that is connected to a Windows server... so thats basically what we wanted. We are going to remove Veeam from the physical server and create a VM, then we can disable BackupExec as mentioned and connect the the tape library.

I have been using Veeam at home in my home lab but with out a tape library. I am excited to start using it at work.