Virtual Veeam Tape Server with ESXi8

[RuaanP]

Hi all

Apologies if I am starting a new thread for an existing one covering this topic but I am getting mixed feedback.

Is it possible to connect a MSL2024 SAS tape drive to a ESXi8 host SAS PCI card and then deploy a virtual Veeam tape server and do a passthrough to the virtual Veeam tape server? Will pin the virtual tape server to the relevant host.

I have seen that VMware does not support it but I have also seen that you can have a physical or virtual tape server which makes me think it might just work.

Thank you

[karsten123]

it might work, but it is not supported.

[david.domask]

Karsten is correct, pass-through is never a good idea due to lack of support and also due to large expected issues with pass-through (e.g., bus resets on the host will likely interrupt the tape backups in unclear ways)

If your tape hardware can be presented as iscsi, this would be supported for virtualized Tape Server, but only with iscsi. I would advise review Tom Sightler's and Rob Turk's answers here for potential issues that pass-through can introduce here. Avoid it; even if it works for awhile, too many potential issues for my taste.