Veeam 13 VSA and Tape Drives

[tgx]

I have a question regarding tape drives. Our Veeam 12 setup had a tape drive attached to it.
As we are migrating to Veeam13 VSA, that option is no longer viable as you can only attach tape
drives to Windows hosts. What we are thinking about doing is updating our old V12 windows host
to serve as a tape device as well as a mount point. We are curious how this works out from a licensing perspective?

After we migrated all of our jobs and repos to Veeam13, we updated the V12 box to V13 but it would
not retrieve a license and installed an eval.

[Gostev]

Veeam doesn't license anything except protected workloads.

Try downloading your license from the Customer Portal, perhaps there's some issue with your customer record that prevents automatic licence download.

Why do you think you can only attach tape drives to Windows hosts? Linux should work too.

[tsightler]

It's probably because, as far as I know, none of the Veeam Linux Appliances (VSA or VIA) support tape, nor do hardened repos, due to root requirements for tape support. I've had several customer tripped up by that thinking they couldn't use Linux at all. However, it's completely possible to install any supported Linux distro and use that and there are no difficult requirements, even a very minimal installation of Ubuntu or Rocky Linux will work as a tape server.

[tgx]

Correct VSA or VIA cannot be used. I was unaware I could use another distro to configure as a tape drive. That is good news and will investigate that. If customers are running into this and thinking they cannot use Linux, it is well possible that some are opting to stay with Windows because of that belief. After all why would you switch to VSA/VIA to still have to have a Windows host to use for your tape device. That was the question we were pondering. It does seem we will still have to have a Windows server to act as a mount server for Windows, or are we also mistaken on that?

[Gostev]

Not really, as Linux is able to mount many Windows file system configurations natively. However, for heavy Windows users, it makes sense to have a mount server for Windows to support advanced file system configurations. However, for heavy Windows users this should not be an issue in the first place to let Veeam use some of their existing Windows machine as a mount server as needed.