Drive multiplexing for tape jobs

[pj888888888888]

So I recently migrated our long term backups from NetBackup to Veeam for tape consumption and started using the GFS Media Pool for long term protection.
Its great, except I have one ask, would it be possible to have a GFS media pool job use another drive instead of constantly trying to point to the same drive over and over again?
My issue here is that all my GFS jobs try and use the same drive, and the only way I can get it to use another drive is to literally admin shut the drive down forcing the job to use another drive by force.

Other than that....its a helluva lot better! It makes library management a snap and its very easy (even though I am having some issues right now....but I am waiting on a fixlet from Upgrade 1)

[Andreas Neufert]

If I remember right we added roation usage of tapes and tape drives a while ago to the code. Can you please create a support case and let out support look at it? Are you on the latest code v9.5 Update 1 ?
Please let us know the support case here and we will monitor it.

[pj888888888888]

well I am on update 1 per se, but it broke my tape jobs and I had to get a hotfix applied to my backup environment. (Which appears to have broken all my replication jobs)
I'm in the process of opening an SR to support though. Will provide SR number once done.

[veremin]

As far as I'm concerned, drive is selected more or less randomly. But even if it were not true, GFS media pools currently don't have parallel processing option, so, what is the use case here to use different drive each time?

[pj888888888888]

The issue I have is that when I have jobs that are queued one after another, they will write to the same drive, which can/has caused the GFS jobs to run slower due to the drive getting dirty during the process.
Not only that, multiplex probably would help my tape backups run a little better if I could use multiple drives during the process.

[Dima P.]

Hi Paul,

run slower due to the drive getting dirty during the process

Have you tried autocleaning feature or it’s not working in your case? Basically, VBR can request if drive requires cleaning prior stating the tape job. All you need to do is load the cleaning media and check the box in tape library properties in VBR console.