Media sets and multi-drive support

[chas0rde]

Hello everyone,
I have to questions regarding tape backups

1) Media sets
Currently I have media pools per retention period (e.g M003 for monthly backups with 3 months retention). Those are assigned to the jobs.
The Media pools create media sets per job (wastes a bit of tape space but allows easiest export into a vault)
In my opinion a good approach which totally doesn't work in real life
After several tape jobs have run it is almost impossible to figure out to which job they belong.

Is it possible to use more variables in the naming instead of just the date?
I would like to use something like "M003_%jobname%_%date%"
This would make it easy to pull the tapes from the lib and put them into the vault and if a restore is required to quickly retrieve them

If not possible: Any other suggestions to solve my issue?

2) Multi-Drive support
I currently use 2 drives of my MSL8060 for Veeam. So to achieve parallel processing I had to create duplicates of all my media pools (e.g. M003 became M003_1 and another M003_2 was created).
This way, if two jobs run in parallel the second one is not waiting while one drive is idle but uses the other drive.
Why do I need second pools for that? As far as I see it there is not direct link between drive and pool. Does the pool get "locked" if one job runs on it?
The "extra-pool" way does not scale very well...I plan to use the other two drives as well which would result in 4 pools each...for bigger environments not very suitable
Also: How does Veeam process the on-the-fly Fulls? Is this causing a technical requirement for the one-drive-per-job limitation? For larger Fulls it would be nice to utilize multiple tape drives since they often are the limiting factor for most -to-tape jobs

Best regards

[Dima P.]

Hello,

The Media pools create media sets per job

It depends on your media set creation option actually. If you set to continue the existing media set all running tape jobs pointed to this media pool will use only the existing one.

Is it possible to use more variables in the naming instead of just the date?

Unfortunately %date% is the only variable you can use in the exising verion

Multi-Drive support

It looks like you were waiting for the exact date of this announcement Enterprise Enhancements in v9: ROBO and Tape

[chas0rde]

It depends on your media set creation option actually. If you set to continue the existing media set all running tape jobs pointed to this media pool will use only the existing one.

Yes I know. I choose this option on purpose to have one media set per Job per Run (Easier Storage in a Vault with independent media sets)

Unfortunately %date% is the only variable you can use in the existing version

Very sad...the Jobname would be great for my above mentioned approach to easily identify tapes to be exported.
Is it possible to do Feature Requests somehow?

It looks like you were waiting for the exact date of this announcement Enterprise Enhancements in v9: ROBO and Tape

That looks interesting Looking forward for the new features...did not yet see much of tape features for v9...will have a closer look into it

[Dima P.]

Is it possible to do Feature Requests somehow?

Yup, your voice counted. Thanks!

[chas0rde]

Is there a special site to do Feature Requests? I looked for it in the Account pages...did not find anything

[Dima P.]

chas0rde,
Veeam Forum’s main purpose is collecting feature requests and your feedback, so once shared - consider its automatically transferred to Veeam R&D for internal discussions