New Tape Library

[nunciate]

Is there anything I need to consider when replacing an existing tape library. We purchase a new larger library for our production environment so I plan to physically remove the old tape library, install the new one and set it up on the same physical server that acts as my tape server and repository. I will take all the scratch tapes that are currently in the old library and put them into the new library.

I need to know how to handle that configuration within the Veeam tape infrastructure setup. Do I just assign the new tape library to all of my media pools, remove the old tape library from those same media pools and then do a rescan? Are there any other considerations? I don't want to accidentally lose all of my previous backed up tapes and don't want to cause any issues trying to restore from those offsite tapes in the future.

[lyapkost]

Hi Alan.

To replace a tape library:
1. Connect the new tape library to the tape server. For more information, see Connecting Tape Devices.
2. Add the tape library to the media pool to which the old tape library was added. Open the media pool settings and go to the Tapes step of the wizard. For more information, see Modifying Media Pools. If the old tape library was added to several media pools, add the new tape library to the same media pools.
3. Remove the old tape library from the media pools. If the old tape library was added to several media pools, remove the tape library from all of these media pools.
4. Disconnect the old tape library from the tape server.
5. Remove the old tape library from VBR. For more information, see Removing Tape Libraries.
6. Make sure that you do not remove the offline tapes from VBR.
7. Offload the tapes from the old tape library and load them to the new tape library.
8. Rescan the tape library.

As the result, the tapes remains in the same media pools and the data is intact.

[nunciate]

Thanks for the info.

[nunciate]

Just wanted to write a confirmation that these steps did work for me however I did have 1 issue which I resolved with support.
After doing the migration I found that any media pool I tried to edit that had the old library showed an error. I would pull properties for the media pools would immediately error saying "tape library was not found (id: )". Most of the settings would not be populated and no tapes were listed for the media pool. I could set the appropriate properties and it appeared to save but any time I would edit they would be blanked out again. Although I did get the error my backups still ran normally and I had no other issues. After applying the fix I had no other isssues.

What we found was that all of the tapes that were associated with the old library had a library ID of Null. What we did was to write a SQL script that set the library ID field of every tape to the ID of the new tape library for each of the old media pools.

[Dima P.]

Hello Alan,

Thank you for the confirmation and glad to hear that you are up an running now. Can you please share the case ID, so I could ask our QA folks to review your case details?

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Case # 03706976