Need training to implement tape jobs...

[bhagen]

I worked with tapes back in the day (1996), when that was the best option. But I've been using Veeam and no tapes since about 2013.

Now I have a requirement to do yearly archiving to tape of our VMWare VMs (and that's expanded to quarterlies, too).

But I'm honestly just not "getting" the whole "media pool" and "backup to tape" / "file to tape" schema in VBR9.5, and the written documentation just isn't doing it for me.

Is there a *recent* video, or a set of videos, in English, that any of you know about, that basically goes from the fundamentals thru the advanced use of tapes for archiving? Maybe my google-ninja search skills are lacking, but I can find nothing but videos from 2015 and farther back, none of which tell me what I need to know.

Any help would be great; thanks!

[bhagen]

I didn't know if I should make this a separate post, or add it to my "need training" post, so mods, feel free to move this if it's more appropriate there.

We've got our normal, onsite, VBR backup scheme working quite well, backing up our vmware environment to a local repository.

The next phase is to configure secondary destinations for each of those jobs. The secondary destination being a repository located at our DR location.

The third phase is to do yearly and quarterly archiving of those secondary jobs to tape.

I have the DR site setup now with the secondary repository: a 2016 server with a 126TB ReFS partition formatted w/64k blocks, and a TS4300 tape library attached to it. That server is setup in Veeam as the tape server, and I can manipulate the tape library thru Veeam (move tapes around, create/delete media sets, erase tapes, etc.).

I've created a test backup job that backs up a small vm to the local repository and has a secondary job defined that points to the DR repository. These two jobs seem to work.

Now, what's the best way to test getting that secondary job to tape? Since nothing I've tried has worked, I'll refrain from typing out all the different things I've tried, and just let somebody suggest the *actual* way.

[wishr]

Hi Bhagen,

I'm not aware of any videos, but I've assembled a set of links that might shed some light on the Tape backups. Of course, our official documentation might help as well.
1. Here is a general article that might be a good starting point;
2. A link to the Tapes section on our best practices portal;
3. Previously I've made a post covering Agent to Tape scenario, but the information provided could help you as well, the thread by the link itself is also worth checking.

Also, I should mention that Tapes are covered by our VMCE course.

Hope this helps! Should you have any additional questions, just let us know.

BR,
Fedor

[veremin]

You need to:

- Create a GFS media pool
- Set there whatever number of GFS restore points you want to store
- Create a backup to tape job and point it to GFS media pool

Thanks!

[bhagen]

Thanks for the links and the info. I have seen and read all of those, and it would still be great to have a video.

I'm confused about the timing of it all. If my goal is to do a normal onsite backup, with a secondary target pointed at our DR site, and then backup those secondary jobs to tape on a GFS based schedule, and the shortest GFS window is a week, how do I "test" this scenario without having to wait at least a week for the first backup to tape to begin?

[wishr]

Hi Bhagen,

The best way to achieve that is to schedule the weekly Backup to Tape job to run on the next day (i.e. tomorrow), according to that article. Then, once you'll become comfortable with the configuration and be ready to go live with the process, you might change the schedule to match real requirements.

Please note, that Backup to Tape jobs require Enterprise license.

BR,
Fedor