Powervault LTO-5 140 - Non-exclusive?

[corestorm]

Hi everyone,

I've been reading the forums for days now trying to solve my issue and I think I'm close but need some help. As a quick overview, I'm using Veeam B&R 7 with the latest update 7.0.0.839 (installed yesterday).

The drive auto installed on the server as an IBM Ultrium 5 HH Tape Drive but was informed via IBM's site to use the Dell driver which the Dell site told me was the Windows LTO Tape Drive driver. I've tried both drivers, with reboots but nothing has worked. This is a 2008 R2 VM running on ESXi 5.5. If this doesn't work I'm assuming I might need to patch ESXi. After much looking around I've seen fixes regarding a non-exclusive driver, but could not find anything on the Dell site, and was hoping some of you that have dealt with Dell might have a fix or download link. I've read all about using an elevated command prompt to install it but wasn't sure if it would work for my drive.

When trying to run a Backup to Tape job (from a backup repository), it runs through everything with 0 data copied and at the end I get the error: Unable to start tape backup session: Tape not exchanged.

When trying to inventory the tape or use a File to Tape job I get the error: TapeNotExchanged WinApiFunction 'GetTapeParameters(ETapeInformation.Media)' failed, code 1117 The request could not be performed because of an I/O error when trying to inventory a tape or use.

I figured I should check here to make sure I'm on the right track.

Cheers
J

[veremin]

The said device seems to be working fine in conjunction with our software, so, I'm not sure what might be wrong in your particular case. From my prospective, it might be worth contacting IBM or Dell directly for more information about existence of non-exclusive drivers.

You can also open a ticket with our support team and let them confirm your environment.

Thanks.

[echoe]

Hello! Just some more information about it, sorry, if this is not relevant anymore or not relevant at all.
I saw a similar error message yesterday with "IBM Ultrium 5 HH 3580 Tape Drive (Tape0)".

Code: Select all

8.07.2014 17:33:20 Warning    Tape drive alert: The tape in the drive is a cleaning cartridge.. 
8.07.2014 17:33:20          Marking tape Tape 2 as a cleaning cartridge
8.07.2014 17:34:20 Error    Failed to inventory tape in Drive 1 (Tape0) Error: WinApi function 'GetTapeParameters(ETapeInformation.Media)' failed, code '21', message 'The device is not ready'

The first two are very strange errors, because it wasn't a cleaning cartridge that was in the drive.
After power cycling the device (it is external), I could inventory the drive without such error and even the backup to the tape worked after that.

I installed nonexclusive drivers after reading the IBM help text about it for some time, and even then just guessing because I had no idea which one is needed for Veeam, or how Veeam behaves with tape drives. The driver that I got for W12R2 from IBM Fix Central had date 15.04.14 and version is 6.2.4.3.

[veremin]

The described behavior looks strange, indeed. You can open a ticket with our support team and let them investigate it directly, as it's hard to find the root cause without seeing debug logs and/or actual environment. Thanks.