Library does not contain any enabled tape drives

[FabianF]

Hello together,

sorry for my bad english (usually I write and speak german ), but I am very desperate. I had open a Ticket with Case-ID 020550, but now we stuck.

I updated Veeam on version 9.5 and later on 9.5U1. Since the upgrade on 9.5 I get warnings and errors in tape jobs.
I get the warning: "Failed to eject tapes" -> Ok this is fixed with registry key
Furthermore I get the error: "Library IBM 3573-TL E.20 does not contain any enabled tape drives". It does not always happen, if it happens than always on different tape jobs and it usually happens if the previous job reports:"Failed to eject some tapes".
I noticed that it often happens when serveral jobs wait parallel to a tape drive. This happen because the scheduler is configured that the tapejobs start after the diskjobs. So I tested and change the scheduling configuration, that the tape jobs start at a specific time, always with a little timegap between the jobs. With this configuration the nightly tape jobs run well but this could also have been random. This configuration is not optimal so i went back to my standard scheduling configuration. The error occurred again.

The other configuaration: The Library (IBM TS-3100, LTO-5 drive) is connect via Fibre Channel to a physical server. According to support the hardwaremanager, the registry and the veeam databases look great.

Anyone with the same problem or any solution?

Greetings FabianF

[Dima P.]

Hi Fabian,

Any chance you see this error while library magazine is being ejected from the library? We had similar issues reported in this thread and it looks like it was resolved by setting the automated export to the mail slot.

[FabianF]

Hi Dima,

I will test it. But I think our case is a bit different to your linked thread. We do not eject the magazines if any job is running. This error also occours if enough tapes are in library.


Greetings FabianF

[jphelan64]

FabianF
We have a very similar issue. We have a Dell TL4000 which is really a IBM Autoloader with IBMdrives. We do not eject tape after the jobs as its a autoloader, but we too have been getting this error only over the last week. We have another issue where we get this error:

StartSessionTape

This error just comes and goes and if you are sitting there when it occurs and do a rerun it works with the same tape that was just an "issue". Or the next scheduled job will just work fine. Its driving us crazy and if they would have a retry with tape jobs like disk jobs we could live with it. We've been messing with different block sizes per Veeam support (case 02107203) trying to get through a whole weekend without it rearing its head. Since one second later it works fine we are not in agreement that the block size is the actual cause of this. To us it would be very consistent if that was the case.

Now to your error. We never saw this till last week when we upgraded the firmware on the autoloader to try and address the error above. Since then the error your seeing we have seen twice. Ours look like below:

Error: Library Dell TL4000 does not contain any enabled tape drives

As with the first error I mention above, a second later it will work either on a job that is queued for tape or if you manually rerun it. The drive never goes offline from the perspective of the OS that it is physically connected to - its only Veeam that thinks that. We believe it has to do with the job checking to see if the drive is available and before it can spool it a queued job grabs it - its essentially a timing issue. We, like you, have these tape jobs set to go after the disk based completed. If I have two jobs at 4:00 PM which finish at about the same time I think that is where we have an issue. If they finish with time to spare and the tape job for the other job is already in progress it doesn't seem to happen, but this is only a guess base don two instances of this.

We cant even deploy this fully since the tape support is so flaky at this point.

If you figure anything out please post it as will I.

Thanks,
Jim

[FabianF]

Hello together,

now I had an workaround. It is not the best solution and I hope, that the error will be fixed.
We created one big tape job. That mean one tape job transfers all of the diskbackups on tape. But this is a bit tricky.... Either you need to know which diskjob is the latest and start the tapejob at the end of this one or you start the tapejob on a specific time but you need to know how long the diskjobs work.
No error occured since we test this settings. So I also belive it is a timing problem.

Greetings FabianF

[FabianF]

Hello together,

some updates. We installed Veeam 9.5 U2 but the issue is still exist.

Greetings FabianF

[foggy]

I'm not sure it was supposed to be fixed, but please inform your support engineer about that.

[goletsa]

After updating to 9.5U2 both my standalone drives goes offline and can't be enabled.
HPE L&TT work with drive Tape0 well.

[goletsa]

Open case 02162928

[toko42]

Was there any solution to this?

I run the latest version of Veeam B&R (as of now) with 2 Quantum Superloaders (LTO3 and LTO4) which worked fine for some time but for whatever reason the libraries go offline nearly after start.

I have de-installed and re-installed the drivers for tape drives and lbraries several times but to no avail.

[veremin]

Was there any solution to this?

According to the latest case, the issue was solved with tape device re-installation (removing and adding back to the tape server).

I'd recommend you reaching our support team for further investigation.

Thanks.

[toko42]

I did that to no avail.
I also re-installed Veeam B&R without success, so in the end I rebuilt the whole server.
Let's see if this was the solution.

[veremin]

I'd still suggest you to contact our support team so that a bug (if there is any) wouldn't go unnoticed. Thanks.