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Pmarsha1
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎09-29-2011 09:22 AM

BackupExec 2010 R3 and Tape device

Hi,

I can add an IBM LT05 tape device attached to an esxi 5 host to a VM by editing the settings.

The VM see's the device and can add drivers, ether Microsoft or Backup Exec

When writew are attempted to tape they fail with what looks like an issue on the SCSC Bus.

I have created a dedicated SCSI controller for this device and mapped to id 0 as it maps to zero within esx.

Does anyone have any pointers how this might be fixed?

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Ethanism
Contributor
Contributor
‎09-29-2011 11:24 AM

I too am having issues with tape drive communication.  Here's my setup:

SAS Controller model = LSI SAS9212-4i4e

SAS Controller firmware = 10.00.02.00-IT

SAS Controller driver = LSI Adapter, SAS2 2008 Falcon –Storport (LSI Corporation, 4/19/2011, 2.0.45.0)

Tape drive driver = QUANTUM ULTRIUM 3 (Symantec Corporation, 2/12/2008, 5.1.37.0)

Backup Software = Symantec Backup Exec 2010 R2 (w/ Service Pack 1 & Hotfix 150096)

The controller is installed in the physical machine, and connected to an external LTO-3 HH tabletop drive.  ESXi 5.0 is installed on the physical machine, and virtualizes two servers.  I've configured I/O passthrough for the SAS controller and added it to the virtual machine running Backup Exec. That machine is running Windows SBS 2011 (Windows 2008 R2 under the hood).  The tape device shows in device manager and in the Backup Exec device list, but trying to do anything with it either takes waaaay longer than it should (30 minutes for an inventory) or fails completely.

I've also tried the suggestions listed here: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101640...

This lets me use the virtual "LSI Adapter, SAS 3000 series..." controller to control the SCSI device representing the tape drive rather than enabling device passthrough and having the VM talk directly to the HBA, but the issues persist.

Any ideas out there?

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