Veeam not detecting new tape in drive

[cantdecide]

The current set-up is a Magstor LTO8 single tape drive physically attached to a server, which hosts the VM (Hyper-V) where Veeam Enterprise Plus is installed (Build 12.1.2.172). For the tape drive to be recognized from the physical host to the VM, I was told to use StarWind Management Console.

So, Veeam accesses the tape drive through iSCSI on the VM server.

The Veeam VM is also acting as the Tape Server.

Under Tape Infrastructure > Libraries is the IBM Ultrium-HH8 standalone drive.

I have been following this guide from Veeam: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

When I put a new tape in the drive and go to the Veeam software, the “import tapes” option is greyed out.

If I click on Inventory Drive, it detects a tape in the drive and puts it in the Unrecognized pool. From there, I can add it to the Free pool and create a backup, which runs successfully (I have verified the tape and can see the files).

When I change tapes, Veeam still thinks that the tape that was in the machine is still in it even though I just put a fresh tape in.

What is the best practice to get Veeam to recognize which tape is in the standalone drive?

[david.domask]

Hi cantdecide, welcome to the forums.

Please see our User Guide page on loading tapes; since you have a standalone drive, we're going to follow the loading tapes without barcodes since as far as I know standalone drives don't have barcode readers. You can skip step 2 as you do not have a mailslot for your drive in this configuration, and during the inventory, Veeam will read from the MTF and get the necessary information to identify the tape from the configuration database (we write a media_id to the MTF, which is unique to the tape in the database)

With standalone drives, basically until the rescan and inventory happens, it won't "read" the tape to find out what is on it; I presume this is to reduce wear and tear. This also happens during job runs (the tape is checked before any writing to ensure we have the correct tape still), and Veeam will understand the tape has changed and identify it accordingly automatically.

[cantdecide]

Thanks for the clarification; I will give that a try.