Mount External HP SCSI Tape Drive

[Oatcake]

Hi

I'm trying to mount an external HP SCSI drive. It is connected to a VHDCI port on a Smart Array 6400 and the controller is on the HCL. I then want to present this to a single VM on the host.

I'm totally new to the Linux/ESX command line world and have no idea how to install the drive. I've searched the forums but haven't had any luck as yet in getting the information I need.

Could anybody point me in the right direction on how to install this please?

MAny Thanks

Julian

[interserve]

first of all since we talking scsi here have rebooted the host after you connected the tape drive

have you check to see that the scsi controller recognize the tape drive during the system start up ?

[Oatcake]

Yes, have rebooted and the the 6400 picks up the tape drive.

[oreeh]

You should use a dedicated SCSI controller for this.

[Oatcake]

Unfortunately I'm not in a position to use a dedicated controller.

I'm using the 6400 which drives four internal SCSI disks and am using the 6400 EM (this is part of the 6400) which has 4 VHDCI ports on the back to drive the tape. There is also a 6i controller that is dedicated to the operating system. So would this not work? The server is anot a production box.

[oreeh]

Quote from the docs:

"Make sure the tape drive is connected to an Adaptec SCSI card, not a RAID controller."

Message was edited by:

oreeh

FYI: many RAID controllers aren't able to properly communicate with a tape device

[Mudbob]

I am pretty sure that a Dedicated SCSI card is required to mount a Tape Drive into ESX.

This is an old article, but here is a link: http://www.vmware.com/support/esx15/doc/esx15_runninga25.html

[Texiwill]

Hello,

As Oreeh has stated, a Tape device must be connected using an Adaptec SCSI card or very few LSI Logic SCSI card. No Raid Controllers are supported or will work. I was in a similar position, so went out and got an inexpensive Adaptec Card for my system. Please note, that while Local Tape devices will work, they are horrendously slow and if the tape device gets skewed (which is often in my experience) you often have to reboot the VMware ESX host to fix the problem. Even if the tape device is forwarded to a VM.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

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Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization