Backup on Tape Autoloader

[Skumar704]

Hi,

We are running two host on Esxi on 5.5 on HP DL380G8 Servers.

Planning to have backup of critical files,DB offsite as well.May be whole VM we can backup or specific files or DB we may backup on HP Autoloader 1/8 6250 SAS based and rotate the tapes weekly monthly etc.

Evaluating the option of Veeam B&R and Symantec Backup Exec.

What we planning to have a one of the existing VM inside the Esxi 5.5 to see the Tape-Autoloader.

But realized that  Vmware doesn't support Tape drives directly connected over 5.x onwards. Does.Does anyone know the reason for this while it was fine with prior version of Vmware.

In that case only left with the option of attaching adding another physical server and adding the SAS HBA and Tape autoloader to this server.

This looks to me additional cost of adding the server with OS.

Is there any other way round,I can backup important data offsite of our office premises.

Regards,

Sushil

[lakshya32]

Hi

Welcome to communities.

Hope its supported TAPE drive .

If so please go through below kb

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101640...

[vervoortjurgen]

hi

you can connect the tape device but its needs to be on a controller that in the HCL list and the tape also

in my experience i only got it working once but i couldn't vmotion the server cause of the pass through tape device, i just gave up and did a separate backup server

so even its a cost, the best way to backup is with 3th server

but if you want to save cost just use a good workstation. also works fine then.

veeam supports backup to tape but be sure to have lots of disk space cause its needs to backup to disk first before it can offload to tape

backup exec needs agent on the VM's. use the v-ray edition of backup exec.

[ch1ta]

Does anyone know the reason for this while it was fine with prior version of Vmware.

I think VMware itself doesn't feel any great about pass-through tape devices. Also, bear in mind that with such deployment in place, you will lock given VM to one physical server. That's being said, you should forget about using Fault Tolerance , vMotion , Storage vMotion , HA , DRS, Snapshots , Memory Hot add, CPU Hot plug , HDD Hot add , VM suspension, etc. 

In the way I see it, the more practical approach will be to use 3-party tools that make tape devices exposed via ISCSI protocol.

Cheers.