VMware Cloud Community
DanieleFiore201
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
Jump to solution

ESXi 4.1 and LTO

Dear guys,

I know that with ESXi there is not service console.

How can i load LTO backup unit drivers in the ESXi.

Did i have to do that during installation ?

Many thanks in advance,

Daniele

Reply
0 Kudos
1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
logiboy123
Expert
Expert
Jump to solution

You can't load drivers for an LTO directly on an ESXi host.

You need to pass the LTO driver controller through to a guest using VMDirectPath and have the guest take control of the Tape drive. I have succesfully done this for clients where they use remote site servers with a single physical box but wanted to seperate their services like Exchange, File & Print, DC, Backups into different servers.

See;

http://www.petri.co.il/vmware-esxi4-vmdirectpath.htm

Cheers,

Paul Kelly

View solution in original post

Reply
0 Kudos
5 Replies
logiboy123
Expert
Expert
Jump to solution

You can't load drivers for an LTO directly on an ESXi host.

You need to pass the LTO driver controller through to a guest using VMDirectPath and have the guest take control of the Tape drive. I have succesfully done this for clients where they use remote site servers with a single physical box but wanted to seperate their services like Exchange, File & Print, DC, Backups into different servers.

See;

http://www.petri.co.il/vmware-esxi4-vmdirectpath.htm

Cheers,

Paul Kelly

Reply
0 Kudos
DanieleFiore201
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
Jump to solution

Great!

But that means : no drivers can be uploaded on ESxi in general or only on this specifica case ?

many thx for the helpful answer!

Daniele

Reply
0 Kudos
logiboy123
Expert
Expert
Jump to solution

I have heard of some people creating their own drivers, I'm not sure how successful this is or if it was only for ESX.

Something I forgot to mention;

I've also implemented a Microsoft Hyper-V solution for customers with single site servers. I have to say that I prefer this solution to ESXi. The reason is that the underlying OS can be used for native implementation of the backup solutions software and hardware. You can do what I said with VMDirectPath, but more then likely this will not be a supportable configuration. The clients that I did this for were supported by my company and we took the risk regarding no Vendor support. I hope that makes sense.

Reply
0 Kudos
mpverr
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
Jump to solution

Hi Daniel -

Why would you want to do this in the first place?  Since you are using ESXi (i'm assuming it's 4.x), then you should consider using the vStorage API interface with your backup solution.  You would simply use your physical server that manages your tape library and use that to perform the backups of the vmdk files.  This would result in nothing getting installed in the ESX console (which there is one if you switch to tech support mode but i wouldn't recommend installing anything in there) and your backups would become much quicker after the first backup since only the changed blocks would get backed up.

DanieleFiore201
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
Jump to solution

Hi,

Many thanks for yor reply, i solved the situation in this way :

- removed the passthrough

- mapped the SCSI devices within the VM

everything worked properly.

But thx the hint it is very good and i will look for it anyhow.

Reply
0 Kudos