Tape Support - Feedback / Feature Req

[Dima P.]

Hello Brett,
Thank you for your feedback!

Your scenario sounds good, but in most of the cases users have two libraries in different locations, in such cases providing the ability to pick up the first available drive in any attached library would not work.

[Toschwil]

There is no need to do that if you use pick up free tape media from free media pool in your media pool options (step 2 Media Pool > Tapes) Are you talking about the ability to share one tape with free space between multiple tape jobs?.

Hi,
thx for your suggestions.
Currently I am fighting with the tape job in a small environment, consisting of two esxi hosts with a total of 4 vms - without Vcenter server.
The hosts are backed up to a NAS in the night and should then be saved on a single Tape (LTO-5) as a full backup. Every day is a different tape be used.
Veeam is running on a physical Windows 2008 Server, this maschine saves itselfs on the nas, too. This backup has to land up with on the individual taps.
On account of the current limitations, I would like to do this all in one job, but do not get it so far back.

[guillermo.lozano]

Hi Veeam,

is it possible that two standalone drives share the media, media pools and all associated features?

Thanks & Merry Christmas !!

Regards,
Guillermo.-

[Dima P.]

Hello Guillermo,
No, it is not possible by design, media pool is "tape library oriented".
Merry Christmas to you too!

[guillermo.lozano]

HI, thanks for the answer.

is it possible to use both standalone drives in a virtual library?

Do you know how may I accomplish this?

Thanks!
Regards,
Guillermo.-

[veremin]

It should be possible with two different backup to tape jobs pointed to two different media pools (created per drive), since with the current version currently two different drives can't be utilized simultaneously within one media pool.

Thanks.

[guillermo.lozano]

Thank You Vladimir!

[veremin]

You're welcome. Feel free to ask, if any additional question arises. Thanks.

[hmshih]

The Veeam software is really bad in terms of handling tapes. We can never get a reliable D2T solution from Veeam. The product is not designed for physical tape. It only works in the virtual world.

[foggy]

Henry, may I ask you to elaborate a bit on your statements? Our tape support may not be flawless, because it is the first version of Veeam tape support ever. Also, it was designed with the specific scenario in mind - to allow customers write their Veeam backup files to tapes, but we are working on improving its applicability to other usage scenarios in future releases.

Your arguments sound a bit subjective and without being supported by some examples cannot be considered as valuable feedback. What specifiс technical/reliability issues or architecture flaws do you observe while working with tape backups in Veeam B&R?

[at1839]

Hi Guys - We love the new tape support in Veeam - We really think it's great for a first version, but there are of course a few things we'd like to see improved

First of all a few words about me. I work for the local University here in Urbino, Italy. We migrated from a different product to Veeam B&R on 2013, September.

As for our policy, we’ve to export tapes to a remote site. I’d ask for a (simple?) new feature on Tape Job – Backup to Tape.

Option: start with <date>

Or maybe (that is the same)

Option: Ignore VBK older than <days>


Why I’m asking for such an option? Thanks to deduplication we do have a 120 days retention now and growing, with daily forward incremental and weekly active full. I cannot really start a tape job which will try to put on tapes a sequence of some twenty vbk’s for each VM

Of course I may rewrite my disk jobs and start from scratch, archiving the old files; actually I will do, because I need. But what if in a future, maybe for a problem with tapes, I’d need to restart the tape sequence? The option to start from a given date will be my life-saving then

Thanks in advance for your attention.

[foggy]

Paolo, thanks for the feedback. Some workarounds that you currently could apply are discussed in this topic: Backup to Tape only last backup with reversed incremental.

[stuartmacgreen]

Can you Inventory a library with a barcode reader AND tapes with barcodes WITHOUT reading every tape's header. In addition if you got 4 drives and 80 tapes, it appears to only use 1 tape drive for inventorying. Can Veeam update its Media Inventory from the libraries own inventory?

So a HP MSL8096 configured with 12 I/E + 84 slots
Tape Vaulting returned to site 38 tapes ... instead of using the I/E slot - unmount the right side of the library and shove in the media in FREE slots.
Close cartridges. Tape library device by default auto scans to update its inventory.
Veeam is now out of date of course. Just update inventory from library?
Is this option available?

[veremin]

In order to understand what is located on a medium, its header must be read. Thus, inventory implies reading of tape headers. And, yes, inventory uses one drive. Thanks.

[SSvatora]

Hopefully this is the correct place to post this... Couple of feature requests for tape:

Ability to Move Offline Media Anywhere
If a media is offline, we should be able to retire the media and/or move it to any library. Currently, we have a media which is causing me problems but neither the drive, library, nor Veeam has determined the tape to be bad, so once we remove the media from the library, we should be able to manually retire the media so that it is never used again. Also, we have media which has a location of "Offline", and we want to be able to move it to a specific vault, but that option is not available (it is greyed out).

New Restore Point Report
This is not specific to tape, but does include tape... It would be helpful to have a report for a specific VM as to the number of complete valid restore points available, and the location of those restore points... including tape. For example, if we have a specific VM which we are performing weekly full backups, and daily incrementals to a repository with a retention period of one (1) month. But we are also performing a backup to tape job to spin off the full backups to tape for a retention period of six (6) months. And, some of those backup to tape jobs span multiple tapes. And now a couple of those tapes have gone bad and are marked as retired. The report would be able to show all restore points available (both in the repository and on tape), where they are located (repository and/or tape), and if those locations are still available (some of the tape jobs are, and some are not due to the bad/retired tapes). Then if we ever want to know how well protected our site is, we could see how many restore points are available (how far back can we restore from), where they are at (do we need to restore from tape, or it is online in a repository), and can we get to them (all tapes needed for a specific RP are available or not).

[veremin]

If a media is offline, we should be able to retire the media and/or move it to any library. Currently, we have a media which is causing me problems but neither the drive, library, nor Veeam has determined the tape to be bad, so once we remove the media from the library, we should be able to manually retire the media so that it is never used again. Also, we have media which has a location of "Offline", and we want to be able to move it to a specific vault, but that option is not available (it is greyed out).

Not sure whether it will work, but have you tried to move this tape to Retired Media Pool or to different Vault via Move-VBRTapeMedium cmdlet? Thanks.

[Shestakov]

Hello Scott,

You can review the list of exported tapes in the corresponding report and there is a Tape Vaults Overview which provides information on tape vaults created in VBR, lists all tapes archived in these vaults and previous tape location. Not exactly what you were talking about, but may be helpful/

As for the second request, that`s a great one and it`s going to be fulfilled by custom backup infrastructure report which is going to be implemented in future.

Thanks for a nice feedback!

[SSvatora]

I ran the "Tape Exportation" report, and on our system it indicated zero exported tapes. Yet we have several tapes which we have removed from the tape library.

As for the "Tape Vaults Overview"... this report indicates that we have one (1) tape in our vault. Yet when we bring up the vault in VBR, there are 15 tapes in the vault.

[SSvatora]

Not sure whether it will work, but have you tried to move this tape to Retired Media Pool or to different Vault via Move-VBRTapeMedium cmdlet? Thanks.

The cmdlet worked perfectly! Now all my tapes are in their correct Media Pools and appropriate Vaults. Hopefully some of these tape move commands make it into the GUI.

Sometimes it feels like I'm the only one still using tapes...

[veremin]

Hopefully some of these tape move commands make it into the GUI.

Actually, it's the opposite process, we try to cover GUI functionality with corresponding cmdlets. It just happens that sometimes PS exceeds GUI in terms of capabilities.

Anyway, glad to hear that PowerShell saves one's bacon once again.

Thanks.

[Shestakov]

I ran the "Tape Exportation" report, and on our system it indicated zero exported tapes. Yet we have several tapes which we have removed from the tape library.

Did you export them manually or they were exported automatically in accordance with settings?

[SSvatora]

We manually remove the tapes...

[Shestakov]

That`s probably the thing, I guess for now the report shows only tapes which were exported due to the corresponding checkbox.
I`ll check if we can modify the report to track tapes exported manually.
Thanks!