connect Tape Device to Veeam in Esxi without using pass-throught card

[mailcuatui102]

Hi everyone,
I have a tape device with 2 tape drive include 4 port Fc connected to 2 san swicth
2 esxi host connected to 2 san switch, with each host have 2 FC port.
1 San provide LUN for Esxi host via San Swich.
in the esxi host i have a veeam backup server.
I have been zoning esxi host with tape device. But the VEEM backup cant find the tape device.
How can VM veeam find the tape device without the use of pass-through card.
Please help.

[david.domask]

Hi mailcuatui102,

Does your tape hardware support connections over iscsi? If I get it right, your Veeam Backup and Replication server is a Virtual Machine, and you're trying to figure out how to get the Fiberchannel connected drives to connect to the VM, correct?

This won't be possible without some sort of pass-through for the physical connection or iscsi. Our User Guide lists the supported connections and devices, and iscsi would be the only supported option here for connecting the tape hardware to a VM.

Alternatively, are you in a position to provision a physical machine to act as the tape server? Once configured, you can add the server as a Tape Server and Veeam will discover the connected tape devices.

[mailcuatui102]

Does your tape hardware support connections over iscsi? --> yes, juts have FC port
If I get it right, your Veeam Backup and Replication server is a Virtual Machine, and you're trying to figure out how to get the Fiberchannel connected drives to connect to the VM, correct? --> yes right.
If VM wants to connect to tape via san swich, is it required to have FC port in pass-through mode attached to that VM? Or use iscsi as you said, right?
If I use veeam backup disk to disk to tape, is it ok?
Thanks !

[david.domask]

iscsi would be best here, because as noted in the User Guide there is no support for pass-through tape devices in VMware environments. So while it can work, there may be issues with such a setup that Support won't be able to assist with.

And correct, for most of your workloads, backup to disk then tape-out from the backups on disk is the ideal method. With Unstructured Data (File Shares and Object Storage), you can go directly to tape, but please note that protecting such workloads directly to tape requires the workloads to consume instances.