Backup to Dell's PowerVault TL2000

[mlucien]

Hello!
Current setup:
I'm currently using Veeam (a vSphere 5.1 virtual machine) to backup my vm environment to a volume on the SAN. No tape backups.

Objective:
I want to backup the vms from the SAN to tape once a month. The tape drive is a DELL TL2000 and will be connected via iSCSI.

What I need to know:
Will a Veeam7 virtual machine support backing up from disk to tape over the iSCSI fabric?

[veremin]

Hi, Moses. Providing that your tape library can be connected via ISCSI protocol to a VM, you should be ok with this scenario. Though, it certainly stands to reason to test such deployment before implementing. Thanks.

[dlieshout@client.nl]

Tip if you do have Veeam on a virtual machine and a tape-unit on a physical machine. User the Starwind free tape-directer to connect that tap-unit via iSCSI: http://www.starwindsoftware.com/downloa ... redirector

[leebtish]

Hi there,

Did you have any success with this ? I'm looking to do the same thing and backup to tape using iSCSI.

Thanks.

[veremin]

As mentioned above, you might want use third party tool in order to expose physically connected tape appliance via ISCSI protocol. Thanks.

[mlucien]

Using windows server 2012 and had some issues with updating the tape drivers. Went back to the generic drivers and connecting today. Will let you know how it works out.

[mlucien]

What is the recommended driver for the Dell TL2000 on Windows 2012? Generic drivers don't seem to work.

[Dima P.]

Moses,

Please double check those drivers from Dell are actually support Windows 2012, as that might be the case. The last up to date drivers I found were here

[Shralok]

Has anyone gotten Veeam 7 (Patch 1) to work with their Dell PowerVault TL2000? I see it in the unofficial list of supported tape drives, but I am having trouble getting Veeam to see the tape library.

I don't have a case # yet because I am currently working with Dell support.

However I wanted to see if anyone here could post how they got their TL2000 to work with Veeam. Right now the tape library driver is not able to initialize.

While Veeam says that "Unknown and Generic devices are not supported", Dell support says that for most backup products (other than Microsoft DPM) the tape library must use the default Microsoft driver which makes the tape library show up as "Unknown Medium Changer" in Device Manager.

The tape drive itself is installed and recognized by Veeam, but it is not showing anything in Media or Media Pools - I can't even add a Media Pool.

When I use the Microsoft driver (Unknown Medium Changer) this behavior is the same.
When I use the IBM driver (tape drive is IBM hardware, rebranded as Dell) it cannot initialize but does appear as IBM Tape Library in Device Manager.

Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
HP ProLiant DL380e Gen8
BIOS Version HP P73
Veeam B&R 7.0.0.715

[Gostev]

Hi Shralok, please try installing the drivers Dmitry just referenced (and don't trust Dell support when it comes to Veeam)

[Shralok]

I am not sure how I did not find this thread. It did not come up when I did a search for "TL2000" on the forums. Regardless, thanks for merging the post.

Here is how I resolved my issue (with Dell support! )...
uninstalled the tape library and rebooted the server for good measure
opened C:\Dell\Drivers\7NH5M\7NH5M\Windows2008x64_R2 (I had already obtained the driver that Dmitry references above)
ran install_nonexclusive.exe
Voila! Veeam works like a charm with my Dell PowerVault TL2000

I was seriously impressed with Kyle @ Dell support. Don't discount them too soon, Gostev!

Apparently Veeam is like Microsoft Data Protection Manager (with the TL2000) in that you need to use the nonexclusive driver. From Dell's readme.txt for the 7NH5M driver:

install_nonexclusive.exe:
install_nonexclusive.exe should be used by applications permitting multiple open handles from a host to a drive to exist at the same time.

I hope this post helps someone in the future!

[Gostev]

We should hire Kyle!

[veremin]

ran install_nonexclusive.exe

Also, some of the users have already reported similar requirement of using non_exclusive for IBM tape drivers as well. Thanks.

[DMS]

The dell support people are quite funny.
Should indicate who is the author of the resolution.

Some time ago I sent the solution to this problem dell support because they pretended to indicate that the problem was the veeam product (and that comment really angry)

regards

[mlucien]

Now that we all have the correct drivers and the tape drive talking to Veeam / vice-versa .... anyone having issues?

I'm some issues where large VMs not going to tape By large I mean 4 TB. Opening a ticket but wanted to see if anyone else had issues.

[Dima P.]

Moses,

Could you, please, confirm: you have problems, backing up 4TB VM over iSCSI? Any errors/warnings generated by tape job? Thank you.

[mlucien]

Deleting the 4TB job, data and starting over.

[Dima P.]

Moses,
Please, make sure you have the lastest available patch R2A for Veeam v7. We will await for your results, thank you.

[mlucien]

I have the lastest patch
I deleted all backups from Disk for that job
I ran a full backup successfully to disk
Running the backup to tape SAYS successful but there is nothing on the disk.
- Copied 0 of 0 files
- takes 4 minutes
-
All my other jobs are set up the same way and they all run fine to disk then to tape.
- Smaller jobs are 1.1 TB or smaller.

[Dima P.]

Moses,
This seems to be an issue then, and no doubts it needs to be deeply investigated by support team. Could you, please, open support case and provide all the troubleshooting info? Please, also update this thread with the case ID, thank you.

[mlucien]

Seemed that the veeam installer service was holding onto the vbm files so backups were failing.

[Dima P.]

So, are you up and running now?

[paps40]

I had the same exact problem using Veeam 7 R2 and a Dell TL2000 running on Server 2012. Using the install_nonexclusive.exe driver from dell fixed my issue. The driver is a part of the 7NH5M_ZPE.exe driver file once you extract it. Dell support was useless in fixing this issue. The dell support tech even mentioned to me that he has never heard of veeam. I hung up on him shortly after that statement.

I used this post to fix my issue so I wanted to reply back and say thanks to everyone.

[Dima P.]

Peter,

Thank you very much for posting this update to the forums.

[paps40]

Dell TL2000 & Veeam Tape Job Compression Issues

Has anyone been able to use the drive compression on the Dell TL2000 successfully. All of my veeam full backup files total 3.7 TB and they are not fitting on 1 tape. It takes 2 tapes. In theory LTO6 is supposed to hold 2.5TB Native and 6.25 TB of compressed data. I have turned off compression on the veeam backup jobs and enabled Use hardware compression if available on the veeam tape backup job. In theory this should tell the library to compress the uncompressed veeam full backup files but it is not working like it should.

I entered tickets with both Dell and Veeam. Dell said that compression is on by default, some files don't compress well and also to get with veeam. Veeam told me to make sure that compression was enabled on the dell side, check job settings, and get with dell. Job settings were correct.

Does anyone have any thoughts on why this doesn't work? Is this working for anyone else? Please advise.

Thanks.

[tsightler]

How much data are you getting on a tape? Less than 2.5TB? Also, after you turned off compression on the Veeam jobs did you run a new active full backup?

[paps40]

I am getting 2.3 TB on each tape. I filled the TL2000 with 20 tapes but was not aware that the veeam tape jobs will write every full backup file to tape that is located in the repository. I assumed it would only write the latest backup.

Yes, I ran full backups during the week after changing the compression settings. This is the 3rd active full that ran after I changed the settings. I do 1 active full each weekend.

I also did a test today (new files to tape job) backing up a test share full of generic user data and it did not compress it. Share was 37.4 GB and the job shows it transferred 37.4 GB at 1 MB/s. My normal veeam active fulls to tape process at 145 MB/s.

Could this be a bug?

[tsightler]

It's possible it could be a bug, at least the issue with not putting enough data on tape. Certainly you should open a support case and have it looked into. Unless the data in the Veeam backup is completely compressible (for example a file server that's already using Windows 2012 dedupe or using NTFS compression) I would expect to get at least some compression.

Running a file backup is going to show that 37.4GB is transferred since it's the tape drive doing the compression, not Veeam, so I would expect this. Also, it's a known issue that backup of files is very slow.

[veremin]

I assumed it would only write the latest backup.

With the current implementation, all the full backups that are stored in the given directory will be archived to tapes by backup to tape job. Though, after initial run, only new files will be transferred to tape mediums.

Also, you can use certain workarounds to copy only the latest full backup.

Moreover, we consider adding this functionality in one of the next product releases.

Share was 37.4 GB and the job shows it transferred 37.4 GB at 1 MB/s. My normal veeam active fulls to tape process at 145 MB/s.

Yep, nowadays file to tape jobs can't boast with exceptional speed in case of copying many small files, as this type of the job was designed with different use case in mind. According to plan, speed improvements will be introduced in the next major release.

Thanks.

[paps40]

Thanks. I don't like the idea of running that PS script because it could cause issues if you are not extra careful. A better approach in my opinion would be to carve up the storage to have a hot landing zone for current backups 7 days or so and a long term archive. Tape jobs can process the latest full from the landing zone. Archive volume can be deduplicated 24/7 with server 2012 dedup. I will have to reconfigure my veeam server and move TB's of data off but it might fix my issues long term. The file to tape speed is very disappointing but at least you will address it in a future release.

New Question on Tape Rotation
What happens during tape swap out / rotation? How does veeam handle that? During my testing, every time I tried to re-use a tape by deleting it veeam re-wrote all active fulls again. Just curious how this works with a tape rotation re-using old backup tapes. For example, if I have a 60 day retention on my repository and 8 active fulls what will happen when I re-use tapes or rotate them out. Will veeam see that some active fulls are missing an re-write them. Is it best to not delete tapes so veeam sees that the old backup is on there and it can rewrite them. I'm going with the approach above but am curious to see how this works as I have not tested it yet.

Thanks.