Attaching Backup Tape device to VM

[Eire09]

Hi,

Is it possible to attach a backup tape device to a VM that is running backup Exec 12.5? I've got a file server that I want to convert to a VM but it has a tape device attached to it. Just wondering will this still work once converted.

My host is ESXi Standard 4.0.

Cheers guys.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Is it possible to attach a backup tape device to a VM that is running backup Exec 12.5? I've got a file server that I want to convert to a VM but it has a tape device attached to it. Just wondering will this still work once converted.

TO connect a Tape Device to a VM you need to do several things.

1) You must have a NON-RAID SCSI Adapter such as an Adaptec SCSI only card.

2) You need to configure the VM to use SCSI passthru to access the NON-RAID SCSI Adapter.

Then you can use it, but if you connect the tape device to a RAID SCSI Adapter it will not work.

The alternative is to restore to another location then just transfer the files to the VM, I prefer this approach if you have the disk space as there are several issues with SCSI Passthru that trouble me....

1) the VM is pinned to the specific ESX host.

2) Any SCSI related issues within the VM tend to require a reboot of the ESX/ESXi host

Granted it has been awhile since I tried this as I now send everything to a BluRay device.

Best regards,
Edward L. Haletky VMware Communities User Moderator, VMware vExpert 2009, 2010

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