Veeam tape selection

[davidlow]

If I have a tape autoloader containing, say 8 tapes - numbered from Tape 1 through to Tape 8, and they are all in the current media pool - in what order does Veeam choose the next tape or is it random?

[Dima P.]

Hi,

Good question, I believe in the same order as they were added to the media pool (I’ll double check that and update this thread). As for general tape media picking logic:

- Retired (that can be overwritten by retention)
- Any free media in the media pool
- Any free media in the free pool (if option to add free media from free pool is selected)

[adam_c]

VTL Lab testing shows that tapes are picked Alpha-numerically. So if you wish to pull tapes in a certain order, they would need to be named in such order.

Example: Tape0 will be pulled before Tape1; HAD84Y will be used before HAD85Z; V00012L5 will be used before V00013L5

[Dima P.]

Adam,

It’s true, however you can’t rename a barcoded tape. You can assign a new name in UI but logic will use the barcode name anyway.

[rreed]

I've noticed my v9 always picks our fresh new (added to Free pool, all human-created pools set to pull from Free pool as needed) LTO-6 bar-coded tapes in numerical order, regardless of physical slot location.

[jwalker55]

I've just recently deployed Veeam and started copying backups to tape using a Tandberg StorageLoader (LTO-4). It's an 8 slot tape autoloader. My tape jobs work fine, except I don't quite understand how Veeam chooses which tape to load. I have a job that runs once per week to copy backups to tape. I want this job to always start at slot 1 and work it's way up. The most recent run over the weekend started at slot 5 and then went to slot 3 and 2 in that order. It looks like it's based on the tape sequence number. Is there any way to change that? Does it have to do with the order that the tapes are inventoried or erased?

[Shestakov]

Hello jwalker55,
As mentioned above the sequence logic is based on the tape barcode, there is no way to change it, but you can put tapes into slots accordingly.

[jwalker55]

Thanks! I searched for quite a while and did not uncover this thread, sorry!

[shabbaranker]

Hi,
Sorry to jump on this thread but it seems its similar to my issue. I have a daily tape library each daily consists of 2 tapes - do the barcodes have to be consecutive to fall in sequence? Veeam wont take the fact that that media set only has 2 tapes available (loaded into the backup device) and there for just use the next available tape? The sequence numbers on those media sets are both currently set to 1 (and thus failing backup) where as the other daily's have sequential numbers and aren't failing.

Thanks