Question about multiple tape drives

[mvierling]

I have two Quantum LTO4 tape drives. In Veeam, they show up up as:

Quantum LTO 4 Tape Drive (Tape 0)
- Drive
- Drive 1

Quantum LTO 4 Tape Drive (Tape 1)
- Drive
- Drive 1


Instead of
Quantum LTO 4 Tape Drive
- Drive
-Drive 1
-Drive 2

The problem this creates is that I would like to have tapes inserted into each drive and then when my copy backup jobs runs, it will automatically roll over to the second drive when the first drive is full. With how they're being recongnized now, that is not possible because each drive has its own Media Pool information that the other drive does not see. Any ideas on how to accomplish what I'm trying to do?

[Dima P.]

Mike,

Please contact our support team regarding this issue - they will provide you with the detailed instruction how this can be fixed. Thank you.

[mvierling]

Mike,

Please contact our support team regarding this issue - they will provide you with the detailed instruction how this can be fixed. Thank you.

I contacted the support team and they said to post in the forums to ask as a feature request.

[Dima P.]

Mike,
I am sorry, I missed the last line and for me it looked like "Tape library and drives are shown as separate devices" known issue. Currently, yes, media pool is 'attached' to each library and there is no way to accomplish such scenario. However we will look into your case and discuss it with the team - that you for feedback and once again I am sorry for misleading.

[Steve_za]

Hi
Any update on this, I have the same issue. Will it be resolved in v8?

Thanks
Steve

[Dima P.]

Steve,

The media pool behavior is not going to change in v8, so it is still linked to the tape library. As for the tape drives and medium changer displayed separately in the VBR UI: we enhanced “device tracking” mechanism, but there is no 100% guarantee that this change would apply to all the tape hardware in the field. So we still have the related KB article, which is still a perfect fix: Tape library and drives are shown as separate devices

[Steve_za]

Hi
I do not have that registry key? Can I create it manually?
Mine is not a tape library, but 2 individual tape drives connected via SAS.

Thanks
Steven

[veremin]

I do not have that registry key? Can I create it manually?

Yes, you should create it manually.

Mine is not a tape library, but 2 individual tape drives connected via SAS.

Can you elaborate on that? What particular problems you experience? You don't have a tape library, but instead two tape drives? If so, the corresponding article is unlikely to help, as it's primarily concerned with tape library's incorrect recognition.

Thanks.

[Steve_za]

Ok I created it manually and it didn't change anything.

I have 2 identical, but separate single tape, tape drives, both connected via SAS. Normally in BE or another backup program you would be able to add the tapes from both drives to the same pool, so when the one tape drive got full, it would carry on on the second tape drive, but I can't do this in B&R.

Thanks

[veremin]

As I've said, the said article is unlikely to be helpful, since is supposed to help in situations when tape library is recognized as different devices. In regards to your issue, currently it's impossible to use multiple drives within one media pool and you have to create one media pool per drive. Thanks.

[Steve_za]

This is really something that needs to be addressed, as it is a common requirement. I am very disappointed that it will not be resolved in v8 as it now means I need a separate backup product, as my backups will not fit onto one tape.

[veremin]

Your voice is counted. Bear in mind though, that priority is given to top requested features (those typically have several page long topic discussions). However, can you elaborate on how the ability to use multiple drives within same media pool will allow you to fit all your backups to one tape medium? Thanks.

[Steve_za]

It wouldn't fit onto one medium, but it would allow me to span to a second tape once the first tape was full, without having to manually change tapes.
I realise most people would have tape libraries for this, but it was a conscious decision on our side.
We didn't want a tape library failing, and to then be stuck with no tape backup what so ever, as this has happened before. So we decided to rather have 2 individual drives so we could continue to back up if one failed.
We just assumed B&R would be able to have tape pools that could span multiple tape drives.

Thanks

[veremin]

Got it. For now the only solution I can think of is to divide existing backup job into smaller ones that might fit into one tape. Then, create one tape job per one smaller backup job and point them to different media pools. Thanks.

[BDietrich]

Hearing that this issue will not be addressed in v8 is quite disapointing. Backup to tape is still a "best practice" and for certain situations mandatory (e.g. legal archiving of DMS content to WORM media).

So please add one customer to the list of people who need to use multiple tape drives (identical or different models/capacities) as a JBOD to automate their backups without turning towards a tape library.

Thanks

[Dima P.]

Hello,

You vote counted, but could you please elaborate your configuration and backup to tape scenario, this would provide better understanding and possibly force the implementation of this feature. Thank you.

[BDietrich]

Configuration/situation:
VMware Cluster with around 25 VMs including Exchange, SQL and Fileserver. Overall space requirement: 2,7TB and rising
Dedicated Backupserver with 6TB harddisk space an two tape drives: 1x LTO5 (1.4TB native) and 1x LTO6 (2.5TB native)

Imagine a nice Friday full backup....
The wish:
To have an unattended full backup2disk2tape I would backup my cluster to disk, dump it to the LTO6 and after that tape is full veeam continues the copy job on the second tape in the LTO5 drive. The next morning I have 2 tapes ejected that contain my full backup.

The reality:
I make a complete backup2disk and after that the copy to tape begins on my LTO6 drive. After the tape is full it get's ejected and veeam waits for another tape in the LTO6 drive to continue. So I have the choice of swapping tapes on my precious weeked or finish my backup sometime on monday.

[Steve_za]

The way I've worked around this is to split the backups to the different tape drives, not ideal as my SQL server varies from 100gb to 500gb incrementals so I need to leave a lot of wiggle room, which sometime pushes me over to 3 tapes, but it is working for now.

Cheers
Steve

[veremin]

Yes, for now a workable solution might be to split existing backup job into several ones, create backup to tape jobs (one per backup job), point them to different media pools that are created for different drives. This way, the multiple drives will be used simultaneously, and capacity of one medium should be enough to host backups created by smaller backup job.

Thanks.

[BDietrich]

Of course the splitting is a "patch" until veeam has a real solution. But if you rely on a tape saving B2D2T with incrementals during weekdays you run into the next problem of veeam: No incrementals only. So the downside of the splitting solution is a doubled amount of disk space to hold your (split) full and incremental (which ALSO includes a full backup! hence the doubling) backups/restorepoints.
This is a vicious circle in which you burn your disk storage and increase the complexity of your backup tapes.

Please veeam developers: enable the consolidation of media pools across independent tape drives!

[BDietrich]

Same topic, other problem I just encountered (or I'm too blind to see):
If you have two (or more) tape drives and the backup job with incrementals demands a new tape you can not distinguish which drive is asking for a tape. Is it the weekly full backup the incremental strategy presumes (which goes to the LTO6 in my case) or does it want a tape for the incrementals (which goes to the LTO5).
This is not as self explaining as the rest of this nice backup software is.
Please add details to the "WaitingTape"-status.
Thanks!

[veremin]

So the downside of the splitting solution is a doubled amount of disk space to hold your (split) full and incremental (which ALSO includes a full backup! hence the doubling) backups/restorepoints.

Not sure why you're talking about doubling disk space. Splitting a big backup job into smaller chunks would result in smaller increments and fulls created. So, the disk consumption should stay more or less the same.

Is it the weekly full backup the incremental strategy presumes (which goes to the LTO6 in my case) or does it want a tape for the incrementals (which goes to the LTO5).Please add details to the "WaitingTape"-status.

I'm wondering whether that situation can be avoided by giving meaningful names to tape jobs, something like "weekly full - LTO 6", "incremental - LTO 5".

Thanks.

[veremin]

Of course the splitting is a "patch" until veeam has a real solution. But if you rely on a tape saving B2D2T with incrementals during weekdays you run into the next problem of veeam: No incrementals only.

As I've just mentioned in the adjacent thread, you can copy only increments with the help of file to tape job. Thanks.

[Steve_za]

I've just run into a new issue, I'm not sure if it is because of the multiple individual tape drives, but when I use different tapes for incrementals, ie, a monday tape, tuesday tape, etc, Veeam does not recognise the tape, presumably because there are incrementals from the previous week on the tape, so it just sit on waiting for tape.
If I move the tape to the free pool, it starts working, but that means all my previous incrementals are lost. I don't see why it can't just use the (1.8TB) free space.
Veeam really needs to get a handle on Tape backups urgently. I love the rest of the software, but tapes are a nightmare

[veremin]

I've just run into a new issue, I'm not sure if it is because of the multiple individual tape drives, but when I use different tapes for incrementals, ie, a monday tape, tuesday tape, etc, Veeam does not recognise the tape, presumably because there are incrementals from the previous week on the tape, so it just sit on waiting for tape.

Most likely the retention period isn't expired yet. What retention settings does the corresponding media pool have? Thanks.

[Steve_za]

The retention period isn't expired, but that is the point. I still have 1.8tb free, why can't veeam use the free storage instead of trying to overwrite what is there?

[veremin]

The retention settings are configurable in media pool options. Whether or not data is going to be appended to tape medium is based on those settings. Thanks.

[Steve_za]

Can you please then tell me what the settings should be, because it is clearly not working as expected.

I've tried setting it to never expire, and expire after 1 month, both settings still do not append the incremental, they try to overwrite it.
So how do I get this to work properly?

[veremin]

Retentions settings are applied to mediasets. So, what media set creation option does the said media pool have? Is it "Create a new media set for every backup session" by any chance? Thanks.

[Steve_za]

No set it to "Do not create" as well and the same issue occurs.
it seems like it might happen after I turn off and on the processing of incrementals in the tape job ( which I have to do due to the way veeam handles vbk and vib files)