Tapelibrary/drives connected on proxy?

[Peejay62]

Is it to be expected that a tapelibrary/tapedrives can be connected to a server other than the B&R server itself? It would make more sense to me that a server owning the disk-repository also would have the access to the tape environment. In my distributed setup I choose the B&R server to be virtual, the backup proxies and repository server to be physical. Now the B&R server also turns into a kind of media-server/backup proxy if using tapes. I have no experience with it, but connecting and dedicating tapedrives/library to a VM seems to me a rather complicated thing. IMO it's the strenght of Veeam B&R being able to make a distributed setup, easily managing resources and distributing workload. In my logic the tape drives don't belong to the B&R server but somewhere on a proxy. At the moment I don't have an alternative to integrate our ( i might say very big) tape-environment into the Veeam infrastructure other than choosing to have physical B&R servers, and that's a pity.

[veremin]

Thanks, Peter, for the heads up; much appreciated. Also, there are already plans to allow proxy servers to handle tape activities in one of the future releases.

For now you should either use physical backup server or expose physically connected tape appliance via ISCSI protocol, using free 3rd party software. Thanks.

[Peejay62]

Ok, tape support on proxy servers is exact what I need (probably other customers too...) Hope to see it appear in the near future. Thanx for the response.

[paulhardy]

Just wondered if anyone from Veeam could hint at a very rough time scale for support of tape via proxy servers? ie. 1 month, 2 months or a year? It will just help with a few decisions I need to make. Thanks

[Gostev]

Let's say 6 months, unless plans change, which they often do

[paulhardy]

Thanks Gostev that's all I need : )

[jcmachadouga]

Let's say 6 months, unless plans change, which they often do

Thanks Gostvev. It will be nice to use our farm of tape libraries.

By they way, add the QUALSTAR RLS tape libraries to the list of supported libraries... It works like a charm!

[Gostev]

Done, thanks!

[cljos]

Hi Guys
Like Peejay62 i have a couple of customers that would LOVE tape support on proxy´s and still be able run Veeam B&R as a VM
Keep up the good work Veeam

[cookiejc]

Hi,

Does anyone know if using V7 with tape and multiple proxies is supported and is there any guidance on configuring this?

If we are using a central management server with separate servers for proxies and repositories I am unsure where the tapes libraries would need to be presented and whether V7 will support central mangement.

Thansk in advance

[veremin]

Currently, tape drives/libraries connected to proxy servers aren’t supported, as them have to be connected directly to management server.

However, we do consider adding this functionality in the next releases.

Thanks.

[cookiejc]

Thanks for the quick reply. If there are any updates on timescales we'd be very interested.

[veremin]

You're welcome. As to the timeframe, the one described above is still valid. Thanks.

[Keyser]

Hi Veeam

Will it ever be possible to have the TapeLibrary attached to the Repository Server Role so that data movement when doing tapebackup can be done locally on the Repository Server?
Right now the Tapelibrary needs to be attached to the Backup & Replikation Server itself which in turn requires you to either also host your repository on the same server or live with the performance impact of moving data across the network. Also - scalability with several tapelibraries would be much better if they could be located on a repository server.

-Keyser

[veremin]

As mentioned above, we do consider adding such a functionality in one of the next product releases. For, you can use third party tool in order to expose via ISCSI protocol tape appliance that is physically connected to the repository.

Thanks.

[Peejay62]

Just out of curiousity and really looking out for a proxy-connected tapelibrary, has your consideration for adding the functionality in one of the next product releases already taken a more solid form, i.e. can we expect something happening there in a forthcoming release?

Thanks.

[Gostev]

Most likely, yes.

[Peejay62]

sounds great,

thanks

[stjg@sams.ac.uk]

Like most here , I have a Virtual VEEAM and a physical backup proxy - which also happens to have an MSL4048 attached to it as the backup proxy is also an archive storage server for other files. However I have to use expensive 3rd party software to backup to Tape ( which includes the VEEAM backup files). So VEEAM supporting Tape drives on proxies gets my vote- the sooner the better.

So some more questions:

1. The "6 month" expectation on supporting this was made in October - as it is now March - any update on this feature ?

2. I would also be interested to know if there are plans to support multiple proxies with a SAN attachment to the same tape library & Drive. This is what our set up is - 3 archive servers attached to the same Tape drive via a Fibre SAN switch - I am , in effect trying to achieve is a LAN-Free Serverless backup environment - is it likely that VEEAM could support such an environment eventually ?

3. As well as the VEEAM backup files on our backup proxies, I also store other 'archive' files on these servers. I would really like to be able to back these up to tape too, using VEEAM. However past testing has shown me that VEEAM Tape backup is optimized for the larger backup files and performs excruciating slow when backing up tens of thousands of smaller files - will this issue be resolved in a later release ?

Steve

[foggy]

1. The "6 month" expectation on supporting this was made in October - as it is now March - any update on this feature ?

As it is stated above, good chances that this functionality will be added to the next major release, which is scheduled for this summer.

3. As well as the VEEAM backup files on our backup proxies, I also store other 'archive' files on these servers. I would really like to be able to back these up to tape too, using VEEAM. However past testing has shown me that VEEAM Tape backup is optimized for the larger backup files and performs excruciating slow when backing up tens of thousands of smaller files - will this issue be resolved in a later release ?

The next product release should also significantly improve file to tape job performance.

[MMoret]

Hi all,

Here is my suggestion.
Image the following setup:
Two sites; active active
We have a B&R installed on a physical server in site A
A proxy in site B
We make local backups and backup copies to the other site (cross).

We have a tape library in site A. We make tape backups for quarterly and yearly archive purposes.

I would like to have:
A virtual backup server (using all the nice HA features).
Two physical proxies for lan-free backup and tape out on each location.
This way backups to tape can be made off-site directly.

Is there anyone who can explain why the backup server must have the tape library and not the proxy (the proxy main function is data transport...)

Kind regards,
Martijn Moret

[veremin]

Hi Martijn, the upcoming v8 release should provide the said functionality; so, stay tuned. Thanks.

[scott.anderson]

Vlad,

do you know if we can look forward to a granular file level recovery straight from tape, rather than having to stage the whole VM to disk before getting file level recovery?

Cheers

[veremin]

Can't comment at the moment. Stay tuned, as we will announce more features closer to v8 release. Thanks.