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davemason38
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Connecting tape HP autoloader to ESXi

Hello all,

I've read so many different forums and posts on the Internet and I've had a lot of conflicting information so I'm now confused.. Can someone please clarify my question? The situation is as follows:-

We have an HP Proliant DL360 G7 with an HP P212/256 Smart Array Controller installed. Connected to this controller is an HP 1/8 G2 LTO-4 Ultrium 1760 SAS Autoloader. On the host server we've install VMware ESXi 5 with several Windows Server 2008 R2 VM's. It is intended that one of the VM's will be the backup server running Backup Exec 2010 R3.

My question is - does this work and does VMware support it? I've installed everything but Backup Exec only sees the tape drive, not the library...  It is better to get another physical server and install only Win 2008 R2 and Backup Exec?

Many thanks!

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jeff9565
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Dave,

Personally, I would get a separate server to manage your backups.  As it was mentioned above, I would use VDR if you want full images of your virtual machines but if you are looking for inside the guest backups - get a separate server.  It sounds like you only have 1 host today.  In the future, if you have multiple hosts with shared storage, you may run into issues with virtual machines (your BE server) vMotioning around on the cluster.

Jeff

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john23
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Use VDR.

From ESXi vm must come to backup location (which would be shared with windows 2008), from backup location you can take to windows 2008.

In ESXi5 VMware does't support vcb ,which can installed on windows.

Thanks -A Read my blogs: www.openwriteup.com
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aravinds3107
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Welcome to the Community..

Did you already checked Configuring vendor-supported tape drives and media changers on ESX/ESXi 4.x and later

If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful |Blog: http://aravindsivaraman.com/ | Twitter : ss_aravind
jeff9565
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Dave,

Personally, I would get a separate server to manage your backups.  As it was mentioned above, I would use VDR if you want full images of your virtual machines but if you are looking for inside the guest backups - get a separate server.  It sounds like you only have 1 host today.  In the future, if you have multiple hosts with shared storage, you may run into issues with virtual machines (your BE server) vMotioning around on the cluster.

Jeff

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UmeshAhuja
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Hi,

As per you query, VMware does not provide support for backup tape drives and tape library devices or their functionality on ESX/ESXi hosts

Refer to link

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&e...

To take the full VM backup and not just a snapshot , I will suggest you to go for Veeam Backup & Replication for vmware

http://www.veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html

OR

If you want to go for snapshot backup then I will suggest you to go for NetBackup for VMware Solutions

http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/other_resources/ent-netbackup_for_vmware_solutions_10-2...

Thanks n Regards
Umesh Ahuja

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davemason38
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Thanks to all for replying!

I forgot to mention we have two HP Proliant DL360 host servers connected to an HP MSA2000. The LTO autoloader is connected to one of the servers. We mainly want to backup the data on the VM's rather than backing up entire VM's.

We have already purchased Backup Exec so I think we will purchase an extra server and install just Windows Server 2008 R2 and Backup Exec 2010 R3 on it and connect the HP 1/8 LTO-4 Autoloader to it. 

Thanks again!

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