Veeam 7 and HP VLS 9000

[Dtoews]

Hi everyone,

Just wondering if anyone is using a HP VLS 9000 in their VEEAM backup design. If so, how are you using it? I'm new to this piece of equipment, and we don't have a lot of documentation on it so I'm learning as I go. I have a HP BL680c blade server running Windows 2012 R2 as my backup server. It is connected into the fiber so that it can see the VLS. However, the device only shows up as a series of tape libraries. Is it possible to configure the unit to act as disk AND tape? We have a 20TB unit and I was thinking of partitioning it off in order to use, say 10 TB as disk and 10 TB as tape.

I'd use the 10TB of disk as my 'landing spot' for say a weeks worth of D2D reversed incremental backups (to allow for instant restore and quick restores of files, etc.) and then have 10TB of 'tape' backup for a weekly and monthly full backup that I could then archive to our HP MLS robotic tape picker for compliance purposes.

Will this work, or is this device strictly a virtual tape library, as the name suggests? Am I overcomplicating this? Will the VLS, configured as virtual tape libraries perform the way I want it to even though the server sees it as tape and not disk?

If not, I will have to look into getting some other storage plugged into the fiber for fast backups. I'm currently using HP P4300's over iSCSI and it's not quite fast enough to get the amount of data I need backed up in the time I require.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Darren

[dellock6]

Hi Darren, never used nor seen this machine. Looking at its specs, it's basically a VTL, so it's absolutely correct that it shows up as a Tape Library, that's the goal of a VTL
Do not know if you can partition it and also use it as a disk storage, you should check it with HP. Be careful however, you are basically placing two copies of the same backup into the same system, not the best design choice if you ask me. You loose the VTL, you loose both copies.

Luca.

[Dtoews]

Thanks for the reply Luca. From what I can tell, it only appears as a tape drive or library. The problem with this is that apparently I can't backup with Veeam straight to tape, even when that tape is really disk ...since it requires a disk based repository for backups. This is great, except I don't have the storage I need to accommodate all of our servers on our existing SANs. I was hoping to utilize part of the 20TB of space available on the VLS 9000 as a repository but apparently that's not possible with this device. I also have a HP MLS robotic tape picker which I can to use as our actual 'tape' backup, so the virtual tape library is kind of unnecessary.

This system was in use with HP DataProtector which was our previous backup system, but after having issues with constantly failing backup jobs and unreliable restores we switched to Veeam primarily due to the fact that SureBackup will let us test backups without actually having to manually test the backups and Instant Restore gives us the ability to recover nearly immediately from a failure. Only a couple of the many great features of the product, as you know.

However, not being able to utilize this expensive piece of equipment in the manner we thought we could is probably not going to be a popular piece of news.

I suppose if we can find some disk somewhere we could keep say a weeks worth of restore points on the disk and then move the backups to the VLS for archiving/long term backup which would still allow us to use the device, but it doesn't change the fact that we're going to need to buy some disk to get things started.

[dellock6]

You are correct, primary destination for Veeam backups need to be disk, via repository agent (windows and linux) or directly to CIFS.
In regards to the VTL, I'm sorry for you if it cannot show its disks with CIFS protocol and only as a VTL, have you already asked for this to HP? From the outside it appears to use the same chassis as the old P2000 with 3.5" disks, but this does not mean it can be used as a block or file storage...

Luca.