Discussions related to exporting backups to tape and backing up directly to tape.
Post Reply
meggerz
Influencer
Posts: 12
Liked: never
Joined: Aug 25, 2016 7:10 pm
Full Name: Megan Gee
Contact:

Tape drive associations

Post by meggerz »

Hello Everybody,

I'm fairly new to Veeam and currently running Veeam B&R 9.5U4 and have two tape drives for backups to tape (both the same). I have different media pools setup on each drive and currently if drive one's tape fills up it will not fail over and continue on drive two's tape. I'm assuming that this is because of the different media pools or media sets setup on each of the drives. For example, if I take a backup that was run in tape drive 1 and try and do a restore from tape drive 2 Veeam will not recognize the tape and I cannot proceed with the restore.

I'm really not sure how these drives are associated or not associated. Is it the media pool? Is it the media set? Or the separate tape drives themselves that cause this behavior?

I would like to have it setup so that if tape drive one fills up it will fail over to tape drive two and continue. Also I would like to be able to restore all tapes from either drive in case one drive is in use when a restore is requested. My final concern is the pre existing backups and if I make changes I need to make sure that the drives can still read and acknowledge these tapes and associated media pools/sets.

Any advice on the best way to accomplish this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Tape drive associations

Post by Dima P. »

Hello meggerz.
For example, if I take a backup that was run in tape drive 1 and try and do a restore from tape drive 2 Veeam will not recognize the tape and I cannot proceed with the restore.
Can you please clarify the generation of these drives (i.e. are you talking about absolutely identical devices or not)? Any chance you are using hardware encryption on these drives?
I'm really not sure how these drives are associated or not associated. Is it the media pool? Is it the media set? Or the separate tape drives themselves that cause this behavior?
Tape device is assigned to the media pool, by doing that you basically tell the system which device should be used to write the data in this media pool.
I would like to have it setup so that if tape drive one fills up it will fail over to tape drive two and continue.
Try to add two drives to the media pool as it's explained in the Help Center article. Set one drive to active and another to passive, as event for failover select no free media available.
meggerz
Influencer
Posts: 12
Liked: never
Joined: Aug 25, 2016 7:10 pm
Full Name: Megan Gee
Contact:

Re: Tape drive associations

Post by meggerz »

Hi Dima,

I'm going to go over the articles now, but the drives are HP-LTO 6 Ultrium 6250 and both are the same. Hardware encryption is disabled.

I have noticed the simultaneous backup option and it looks like a good option for me but I had a question. I was wondering, if you have two tape drives working simultaneously and one tape fills up but the job is not finished will that job fall back over and complete on the other tape drive once that second tape drive finishes it's job that was currently running or will it want another tape for the original drive that the tape filled up on?

Thanks!
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Tape drive associations

Post by Dima P. »

two tape drives working simultaneously and one tape fills up but the job is not finished will that job fall back over and complete on the other tape drive
If parallel processing is enabled, it can either finish the first tape to complete the job (if there is nothing to process on disk) or request another tape media to be inserted into the second drive as you still have some data to be processed. To learn more take a look at this Help Center article - Tape Parallel Processing. Cheers!
meggerz
Influencer
Posts: 12
Liked: never
Joined: Aug 25, 2016 7:10 pm
Full Name: Megan Gee
Contact:

Re: Tape drive associations

Post by meggerz »

Hi Dima,

I have gone over the reference material and I'm not going to worry about parallel processing right now but I have attempted to start to use the active passive method on the media pool in question so that when one tape fills up it fails over to the second tape drive. But the issue I'm having is when I take a tape from media pool T1-daily-LTO6 (which has both tapes drives added to it T1 active and T2 passive) and try to inventory the tape or use that tape in drive T2 it will fail. T2 will fail to recognize the tape and will not inventory it or use it to backup once T1 tape fills up.

For example: Today in T1 drive I put tape T1-9 and in T2 Drive I put Tape T1-10. But when I inventory Drive T2 it fails and tells me that it has "Tape 18, Expires In: Not Defined, Media Pool Unrecognized, no media set, Sequence # 0, Capacity 2.3TB, Free 1.2TB. This should say T1-10 media pool T1-daily LTO6 because that's what it actually is.

What do I need to do to get my T2 drive to acknowledge tapes that where created in the T1 drive so that I can take advantage of the active/passive failover feature?

This is the part that I don't understand, what is associating or disassociating the tapes to the drives (two standalone drives).
Dima P.
Product Manager
Posts: 14396
Liked: 1568 times
Joined: Feb 04, 2013 2:07 pm
Full Name: Dmitry Popov
Location: Prague
Contact:

Re: Tape drive associations

Post by Dima P. »

Hello Megan,

Tape drive is associated with the Media Pool, so unless you've added both tape drives to that Media Pool it wont work (you still can use separate media in multiple drives but it wont be possible to share media between these devices). Try to add both drives to the same media pool, set one device as passive and retry the inventory. Cheers!
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 21 guests