Different LTO drive verssions in one Library

[TheRealBluesMan]

Hello

We have a HPE Tape Library MSL3040 with 3 Drives. 2 are LTO8 and 1 is a LTO9 drive.

Now, if i have a media pool which is having LTO8 and LTO9 tapes, veeam doesn't recognize that the LTO9 tape can only be loaded into the LTO9 drive to write data.

The LTO8 tapes are working as expected in all of the 3 drives.

Why is the veeam application trying to load an LTO9 tape into a LTO8 drive, because veeam is showing the "HPE Ultrium 9-SCSI" under Model?
So application knows about the information's from tape and drive perspective.

Shouldn't vbr verify the label code and put the LTO9 tapes only into LTO9?
Why isn't it possible to assign specific drives to a media pool, to be able to create separate media pools for LTO9 tapes?

Thank you in advance.
Mitch

[david.domask]

Hi Mitch,

Please see this section of the User Guide:

Within a library partition, only one generation of LTO drives or IBM 3592 drives is supported.

Currently a limitation, mixing and matching of LTO generations is not supported.

> Shouldn't vbr verify the label code and put the LTO9 tapes only into LTO9?

In theory works, but mislabeling is quite common and until the tape is loaded to the drive, it cannot be 100% confirmed on the tape generation as it's always possible the label was switched or misapplied accidentally or unreadable. So the tape barcode is not always reliable.

> Why isn't it possible to assign specific drives to a media pool, to be able to create separate media pools for LTO9 tapes?

Typically this is best done with the tape hardware's own partitioning feature if your tape library supports it, but currently not possible to assign only specific drives to a media pool (you can limit the number of drives a media pool can use, but not assign specific drives)