Post 9.5 Issues with tape infrastructure

[MerlIT]

Case #00942082 Applies
Reporting my experience with tape handling in 9.5 for information. I would go straight back to my old install if I could without downtime.

Upgraded a very simple environment from 8.5 to 9.5. All VBR components on single hyper-v host with SAS tape library attached. Simple backup schedule of Weekly Full with daily incrementals, all driven by a single job. The job kicks off a copy to tape, with full backups to one media set and the dailys to another. Everything worked fine under the old release.

First backup job after upgrade was a Weekly Full. This pulled two media from the Free pool, allocated to Weekly pool as expected. It also pulled one media from Free and added to the Daily pool, writing nothing to the tape.
Subsequent runs of the Daily Backup job have kicked of the Copy to tape job in the normal fashion. However, each time the job has pulled another tape from the Free pool and allocated it to the Weekly pool, writing nothing to it. It has then appended the daily backup .vib to the existing Daily media.

Support have stated that this is a known issue which will be fixed in a forthcoming update.

In the interim, manual intervention is required regularly to reallocate all the unused, but allocated Weekly media back to free. This throws up another issue: the reallocated media are incorrectly shown. For instance, I had removed the two Weekly Full media to send offsite. They were not showing in the GUI for online media. After two days, I reallocated two Weekly media to Free. After the process finished the GUI was updated and showed the two Weekly Full media that were, by then, offsite in the slots in which they had been created. A rescan was necessary to clean this up. I reproduced this three times before reporting.

Sigh....

[Dima P.]

Hi MerlIT,

Can you share the correct case ID? The one you shared points to the issue with snapshot removal. Thanks.

[MerlIT]

# 01994632
Sorry quoted an open case with WatchGuard. Not been a good week.