Tapes are no longer mounted to Online.

[jboettger]

Good morning. Has anyone seen this occur? I have a an up to date/current version of Backup & replication server installed on an HP Gen 10 DL380 with 120tb of disk storage. I have 3 Quantum LTO-8 drives connected to a two port HP P408e-P Storage Controller with a 4-way SAS cable in port 1. All was working great until I tried to add a Quantum LTO-9 drive connecting it to port 2 as my backups have exceeded the space on the 3 LTO-8 drives. The weeks incrementals, fulls, etc are backed up to shared drive on this server and then backed up to tape over the weekend and taken offsite Monday morning. After adding the LTO-9 drive Veeam no longer will put the tapes online after doing an inventory. Tapes show offline after even though it's reported back that the inventory was successful. Hardware wise, the server sees all four drives. The IBM Tape diagnostic tool tests all pass on all four tape drives. Device Manager sees the drives and reports back the status of usage loads, hours, written etc. without issue.

Any ideas why B&R will no longer mount the tapes sucessfully or what to check?

I have an open ticket with Support and they also seem baffled as to what might have caused this.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Jim

[HannesK]

Hello,
could you maybe share the case number?

Mixing different LTO generations is probably the reason. I guess it's an unsupported setup.

Just to clarify: it's three LTO8 and one LTO9 drive directly connected without any tape library?

Best regards,
Hannes

[jboettger]

Morning. Case # 05389313 That would somewhat make sense however when I remove the LTO-9 drive completely and only have the LTO-8 drives available, inventory still fails on the 3 existing LTO-8 drives.
There is no tape library. All standalone tape drives. I can attached snip images as needed.

Thanks,
Jim

[HannesK]

Hello,
hmm, if it still fails after reboot without the LTO9, then I can only refer back to support. Support can check the logs.

I mentioned the reboot, because it solved many issues in the past (not that I have tried what you described).

Best regards,
Hannes

[jboettger]

Yes. I've rebooted at least 20 times if not more throughout this whole endeavor.
It's odd that this would be a mixing issue as an LTO-9 tape drive is downward compatible with an LTO-8 tape and especially since they are all stand alone drives.

It's like some switch/registry item/configuration setting was switched off for all tape drives. It's weird that the LTO-8 drives stopped immediately after plugging in the LTO-9.

I installed ArcServe 18 to test the drives and it had no problem doing a backup to any of the drives however, the problem there is that Arcserve takes 90-100 mins to backup a 1tb and Veeam takes just under 60 mins to backup a 1tb of data. Veeam speed to tape allows my backups to fit in my weekend window.

Thanks,
Jim

[Dima P.]

Hello Jim,

Thank you for the feedback! Mixing LTO tape / drive generations should not lead device being set to offline state (instead you should get a warning when using such configuration if I am not mistaken). Please keep working with our support team and let us know how the investigation goes. Thank you!

[jboettger]

Thanks for the response. Further to this. I physically disabled and removed the LTO-8 tape drives from the server. Rebooted and then plugged the Quantum HH LTO-9 tape drive to see if it would function correctly as the only tape drive on the physical bus. Whereas the server saw it in device manager and IBM diagnostics test passed all tests, and Veeam saw it in the B&R console, I put a brand new blank tape into the drive, ran inventory where it appeared to run and complete and as it was a new blank tape it should have been marked as Free where I should then have been able to assign it to my media pool however it did not show up.

This would appear to be a Veeam software issue but I guess it could be a tape drive driver issue.

I'm in contact with tech support on this, both Veeam and Quantum but it's rather frustrating as both are flummoxed by the issue.

[jboettger]

Thanks for everyone's insight on this.
The issue is with the Quantum HH LTO-9 driver.
The workaround was to load the default LTO driver from Microsoft on this drive which allowed Veeam to see the tape and inventory it.

The Quantum folks are working on a new driver. No release date given.

Thanks again,
Jim

[Dima P.]

Hello Jim,

Glad you nailed it and thank you for sharing the updates with the community!

[tfogle]

Hey Jim,
I'm having the same problem. You said the workaround was to use the LTO driver from MS. I assume that was for the lto-9. If so, what version OS are you running?

Thanks,
Todd.

[Dima P.]

Todd,

IBM states that LTO9 drivers are supported by all Windows systems (except EOL Windows versions), I'd expect the same from default MS drivers. What driver/library you are using and what is tape proxy operating system type? Thanks!