Quantum Scalar i3 Auto Cleaning

[sconley]

Veeam is not recognizing cleaning tapes (and yes I do have 5 cleaning media inserted) in our tape library. Does this mean that the automated drive cleaning in Veeam will not work correctly? Is this expected behavior with the Quantum tape libraries and I just need to enable automatic cleaning on the library?

[veremin]

Backup server puts cleaning media into Unrecognized media pool - may be this is what confuses you? This is expected behaviour. Thanks!

[sconley]

There is no unrecognized media pool, which is what I was expecting from researching this. It seems like when I do an inventory of the library Veeam only discovers the media that is part of the partition it is using, which doesn't include the cleaning media. I don't have experience with other media libraries, so I'm unsure if Quantum is just doing something a bit different than others. I do have the option to do automatic cleaning within the library itself and disable it within Veeam, however the documentation recommends to use application managed cleaning if available. So I was wondering if others had experience with this situation specifically.

[csydas]

Hi Sean,

We have Quantums and you have to put the cleaning tape in a normal slot on the partition presented to the application (Veeam in this case)

http://downloads.quantum.com/scalar/i40 ... sGuide.pdf

This is for the i40, but check this:

In addition, you do not need to configure cleaning slots if you use host-based cleaning. Cleaning slots are not visible to the host application. To use host-based cleaning, configure zero cleaning slots in the library and set up your host application to manage the cleaning process. See your host application documentation for more information.

In this case, Veeam is the Host Application, so you need to not use cleaning slots and just put the tapes in normal slots. Host applications cannot see such things, thus Veeam can't

[sconley]

I'm assuming that the i40 uses CoD licensing similar to the i3, so do the cleaning tapes consume a licensed slot when used in this way? I have scoured the manual for the i3 and what you referenced isn't there. There doesn't even seem to be a .pdf version I can search. If I don't sort this out myself I will touch base with Quantum support and see what they have to say.

[csydas]

Well, I'd just shove it in a data slot on the partition presented to Veeam -- I bet you it will show immediately. We didn't lose a slot like this at all since again, we're not using dedicated slots at this point.

[sconley]

The issue is we didn't license all 50 slots that are available to begin with, which we maybe should have. My recommendation is going to be to add two cleaning tapes to the data partition since we have two drives, and license the other 25 slots in the unit. This also technically gives us more usable slots for storage in the future since when assigning cleaning slots you have to assign a full five tape cartridge even if you only really want two. Thanks for your input.

[Dima P.]

It seems like when I do an inventory of the library Veeam only discovers the media that is part of the partition it is using, which doesn't include the cleaning media

Harvey is right. Cleaning tape should be stored in the regular slot of the partition presented to the Veeam B&R server. Once library is partitioned on a logical level, every partition is being treated as separate tape device and, as a result one partition has no access to the tapes stored in another partition. Cheers!

[sconley]

I got this working with with the input from this thread. It was just a matter of matter of replacing two tapes that were not being used for data with cleaning tapes and Veeam started working as expected. I was just misunderstanding how everything was being presented to the host initially. Thanks for helping me work through this.