Tape drive not enabled (VB&R migration woes)

[rsberzerker]

Case #06140129

How do I get a tape drive to be enabled?

We upgraded our VB&R OS from Server 2012R2 to Server 2019, physical server. We were dual-booting for a bit until we got things migrated to give us a bigger working window, so the hardware, other than the hard drive we boot from, hardware is identical. We did it this way for budget reasons. On the 2012 server, the tape drive works fine, but it shows disabled on the 2019 server in VB&R. Device manager shows everything is OK in 2019.

On the 2012, we were running VB&R 11, then upgrade to the latest VB&R 12 to do the config migration (because VB&R 12 uses Postgres and you can't migrate the config from MS SQL to Postgres and jump VB&R versions). Then we migrated the config to 2019, also running the same version of VB&R 12. All jobs on 2012 are still disabled. However, no matter what I, or support, do, the VB&R still shows the tape drive as disabled. If I boot back into 2012, the tape drive works fine.

We've tried unchecking enabled, rebooting, re-checking, rebooting - no change. We've tried enabling it using veeam powershell, but no change. Driver is same manufacturer and date as the working 2012; version is different, but with different OS's, that's expected. I also tried 3rd party drivers and removing the drive from device manager and letting Windows find it again. No change. Running out of ideas and we are missing scheduled backups.

My support engineer is thinking the drive ID may be messed up in the database, but doesn't know how to check that.

[Mildur]

Hi Robert

If database editing is required, your engineer will be able to ask the right team for help. Unfortunately we cannot provide such help over the forum.
I believe the best way forward is your support case. In case you think it's not going forward as expected, please use the "Talk to a manager" button:
https://www.veeam.com/kb2320

Best,
Fabian

[rsberzerker]

What the second engineer (first gave up) did was basically delete the tape library. I had to re-create it. However, that partially deleted the tape history, so I'm having to re-catalog -- not re-inventory, re-catalog -- every tape. Still getting duplicate tape warnings all over the place and trying to resolve that. Also, it's now saying the changer is missing and refusing to run any jobs.

[rsberzerker]

Update: We still don't have working backups. Engineer is blaming drivers, even though those drivers worked before the upgrade.

I believe the problem is when he deleted the drive and changer directly from the database, it left pointers that are now invalid. How do I clean up the tape system to stop seeing the deleted changer and see the correct one? I can't add the picture directly, so here's a reproduction of what I see when I look at my free tapes' properties. The part not shown is the label is the same, which makes sense since the slot is the same. If you add up all the Quantum UHDL 0100 tapes, and there is an equal number of unknown changer tapes, this is the correct number of free tapes in the system.

Code: Select all

Free 	Capacity   	Location	Library
			Slot 13		Unknown changer
0 B		0 B	Slot 13 	QUANTUM UHDL 0100

[Mildur]

Hello Robert

I'm sorry to hear that. Let me check the case and talk to support management if necessary.

Best,
Fabian

[Mildur]

Hi Robert

I have discussed the case through our support management.
Your support engineer should reach out soon with the next steps.

Best,
Fabian

[rsberzerker]

Thanks Fabian.

I am cautiously optimistic the problem is solved. What finally solved it was this:

1) I physically removed all tapes from tape system.
2) After a rescan, we went into the database, table tape.tape_medium, and found the labels of tapes still showing unknown changer. We deleted those rows. Those all had the same location_library_id value (all the rest had null since the drive and library were empty). After a restart, the duplicates were cleared out.
3) We then had to right-click on the media pool for the backups tapes -> tape library was still showing unknown changer. Manage and we added the "good" changer and deleted the "unknown changer".

After step 3, all the tapes in the pool that were offline disappeared. However, just putting the [used/still had data we wanted] tapes back in the drive and doing a rescan was enough to restore them.