VMware Cloud Community
renekuiper83
Contributor
Contributor

direct access tape drive from virtual machine

hi all,

we have currently some physical servers that we want to virtualize on esxi.

these servers have a lot (~15/20TB) of san storage attached that we want to backup directly to (HP) fibre attached tape libaries.

what are the (best) options to backup this storage assuming RDM disks will be used?

we've did some tests with a fibre tape drive zoned to an esxi server and mapped as scsi tape drive to the virtual machine. the tape drive (HP MSL) shows up in the virtual machine (server 2008 R2), everything looks fine and hp libary and tape tools says everything is fine but we're getting an error that we cannot read or append to the medium.. the tape drive is on a seperate scsi controller.

i've read that that this configuration isn't exactly supported but several people seem to use it and we want to do at least some tests to examine to possibilities/throughput... any ideas on this?

Reply
0 Kudos
0 Replies