Autoloader config assistance

[ray201]

Hello Guru's

I was wondering if anyone could help out a bit configuring an tape autoloader in the way i would like it to run. Have to admit its been a while since i last used a tape libary but in these crypo-times tape is suddently back in fashon again

Short about our setup

We are running Veeam B&R 12.1.1.56 with a few disk repos and we have now added a DELL TL4000 with LTO-7 drive to this infrastructure. We would like to run a copy job of all repo's to the autoloader for a extra copy.
This autoloader has 4 magazines giving me 48 slots with tapes with IO stations disabled. Our data amount is too large to fit to one tape, so a complete backup will be spanned over several tapes. The idea is to get weekly and monthly full backups to tape and remove from the autoloader so its untouchable. I also have 2 spare mag's for the autoloader and will buy more when needed.

How do i go about in the world of media pools and vaults to have the autoloader put the rights tape into the correct magazine after the job is finished? this would save us from ejecting single tapes and just swapping a magazine when its full. We would then insert a new mag with either blank tapes or old ones ready for overwrite.

Should i setup one vault per mag? How should the media pools be setup in this case? Should i use a standard pool or the GFS option?
Should it take tapes from where ever, then put them in a specified magazine when done?

Any pointers in the right direction is highly appriciated

Cheers
Ray

[david.domask]

Hi Ray, welcome to the forums.

Thanks for the description here, I think I get your tape-out goals and I believe you want GFS Media Pools, which I'll explain shortly.

First, I advise take a look at our Forum FAQ for Tape, as I think it will help clear up a few terminology confusions with Veeam's Tape implementation.

Veeam can be configured to Export Tapes on successful job completion, but this will move the tapes to the IO Slots - I understand you have IO slots disabled, but for easy removal without having to open the magazine door (which tapes the library offline for most OSes), IO Slots are the way to go. This is the best way in my opinion as it avoids disrupting the other operations and allows the operator to remove tapes from the IO slots at their leisure. The configuration is done in the Media Pool and the job settings -- Vaults in Veeam are a logical container that tracks tapes no longer in the library, so it's not required to use Vaults for your planning, but it likely will help as tapes in Vaults can be flagged with things like Software Write Protection (i.e., Veeam will not allow write operations performed by Veeam on such protected tapes, this is limited to Veeam however).

I think that ideally Tape GFS is what you want to do -- with GFS media pools, for each media set (weekly, monthly, yearly, quarterly), you can configure which tapes the media set is allowed to pull from. If you just align it that only the tapes in the specific magazine are allowed to be chosen for a given media set, this means that all you need to do is just configure which tapes are allowed and it should only pull from those tapes. Keep those tapes in your desired magazine, and you should achieve your goal.

Start with the above, and let us know if you have further questions.

Thanks!