Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?
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About a year ago I had this thread discussing starting to use tape for backups. Well, it never got implemented and now I am just getting around to being able to make this work. However, I am running into issues that didn't come up in our planning and I think I need to modify the plan and or scrap it and come up with something else.
Right now I have a Veeam inside a 2012R2 VM running on Hyper-V 2019. My tape drive is connected via SAS to the host. I am trying to get Veeam to talk to the tape drive but I ran into a glaring problem. I cannot seem pass through a tape drive to my VM. Am I right about this? I can't pass through the entire SAS controller, it would have had to been the drive itself.
I see two options moving forward.
- Run Veeam physically and not inside a VM
- scrap the idea of tape and convince my management to consider cloud options.
Thoughts? I am in the process of completely reevaluating how we are setup and what exactly we would do if we encountered issues that required us to need these backups.
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I researched that not long ago and you can do pass-through in Hyper-V but it's not supported by Microsoft.
So you could pass through the entire SAS controller.
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@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
About a year ago I had this thread discussing starting to use tape for backups. Well, it never got implemented and now I am just getting around to being able to make this work. However, I am running into issues that didn't come up in our planning and I think I need to modify the plan and or scrap it and come up with something else.
Right now I have a Veeam inside a 2012R2 VM running on Hyper-V 2019. My tape drive is connected via SAS to the host. I am trying to get Veeam to talk to the tape drive but I ran into a glaring problem. I cannot seem pass through a tape drive to my VM. Am I right about this? I can't pass through the entire SAS controller, it would have had to been the drive itself.
I see two options moving forward.
- Run Veeam physically and not inside a VM
- scrap the idea of tape and convince my management to consider cloud options.
Thoughts? I am in the process of completely reevaluating how we are setup and what exactly we would do if we encountered issues that required us to need these backups.
Or you can use a VTL with Veeam. AWS and Starwind have their own. There are others, but I am not familiar with them.
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I'm in a similar situation as we are also setting up a tape backup.
However we are on xcp-ng as our general hypervisor of choice.Problem for us that we want to do backup to disk and then disk to tape. Today's tape drives requires about 700 MByte/sec of data to be happy. And if you are talking about many TBs of data then a hypervisor starts to make things very complicated.
I'm leaning towards having a dedicated server with lots of disk and tape drive/library over SAS. Let it do the actual disk to tape transfer.
And then run VMs on another host that actually does the backup to disk. Something along those lines.
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@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
I researched that not long ago and you can do pass-through in Hyper-V but it's not supported by Microsoft.
So you could pass through the entire SAS controller.
I can't do the entire controller, the VM is running on an array on that controller.
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@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
I researched that not long ago and you can do pass-through in Hyper-V but it's not supported by Microsoft.
So you could pass through the entire SAS controller.
I can't do the entire controller, the VM is running on an array on that controller.
OK, get another controller then.
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@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
I'm in a similar situation as we are also setting up a tape backup.
However we are on xcp-ng as our general hypervisor of choice.Problem for us that we want to do backup to disk and then disk to tape. Today's tape drives requires about 700 MByte/sec of data to be happy. And if you are talking about many TBs of data then a hypervisor starts to make things very complicated.
I'm leaning towards having a dedicated server with lots of disk and tape drive/library over SAS. Let it do the actual disk to tape transfer.
And then run VMs on another host that actually does the backup to disk. Something along those lines.
yeah, we're already backing up to disk, I'm just getting the second layer sorted out.
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@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
I'm in a similar situation as we are also setting up a tape backup.
However we are on xcp-ng as our general hypervisor of choice.Problem for us that we want to do backup to disk and then disk to tape. Today's tape drives requires about 700 MByte/sec of data to be happy. And if you are talking about many TBs of data then a hypervisor starts to make things very complicated.
I'm leaning towards having a dedicated server with lots of disk and tape drive/library over SAS. Let it do the actual disk to tape transfer.
And then run VMs on another host that actually does the backup to disk. Something along those lines.
yeah, we're already backing up to disk, I'm just getting the second layer sorted out.
Tape drive, is that as in 5-1/4" drive or external SAS drive or external SAS tape library?
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@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
More info on VTL-
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-tape-library
https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/vtl/That's disk backup, not tape. Just tape emulation in software.
I assume, like us, he wants to use real tape.
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@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
More info on VTL-
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-tape-library
https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/vtl/That's disk backup, not tape. Just tape emulation in software.
I assume, like us, he wants to use real tape.
His second option says ditch tape
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my plan had been to use real tape, as we wanted to physically move it off site. But things may change
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@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
my plan had been to use real tape, as we wanted to physically move it off site. But things may change
How much data are we talking? How are you currently getting tapes offsite?
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@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
my plan had been to use real tape, as we wanted to physically move it off site. But things may change
How much data are we talking? How are you currently getting tapes offsite?
If he uses LTO-8 tapes it's 12TB native/ 30TB compressed per tape.
PS. Transfer rate btw is 900 MByte/sec, 700 MB/sec was LTO-7 tape.
You need 10Gbit sized internet pipes for cloud backup to even compete with that. -
@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
my plan had been to use real tape, as we wanted to physically move it off site. But things may change
How much data are we talking? How are you currently getting tapes offsite?
If he uses LTO-8 tapes it's 12TB native/ 30TB compressed per tape.
Yeah, that is quite a bit. Is he only using 1 tape a week, or 20?
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I'm not currently using tapes yet. I bought some LTO-7 tapes, but they've been on my shelf for like a year because other projects came up. I had been planning like 1 a week or some similar interval.
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@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
I'm not currently using tapes yet. I bought some LTO-7 tapes, but they've been on my shelf for like a year because other projects came up. I had been planning like 1 a week or some similar interval.
LTO-7 is 6TB native / 15TB compressed so still a lot.
Do you have a lot of VMs running on it? You might want to consider going bare metal. Solves your problem without any hassle.
Or as mentioned, just get a second controller for the tape and pass that through the hypervisor. You only need a simple HBA SAS-2 (6Gbps) for a tape drive.
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@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
LTO-7 is 6TB native / 15TB compressed so still a lot.
Right, but he still hasn't said how much data he actually has. What is a standard full backup and what is his change rate. How often will full backups be run, etc.
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@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
LTO-7 is 6TB native / 15TB compressed so still a lot.
Right, but he still hasn't said how much data he actually has. What is a standard full backup and what is his change rate. How often will full backups be run, etc.
Yes, but what he does today would probably change if he the tape up and running. Otherwise why invest in tape? A single tape drive is something like $3K-$4K and simple 1U/2U tape library in the $7K-$8K range.
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@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:
LTO-7 is 6TB native / 15TB compressed so still a lot.
Right, but he still hasn't said how much data he actually has. What is a standard full backup and what is his change rate. How often will full backups be run, etc.
Yes, but what he does today would probably change if he the tape up and running. Otherwise why invest in tape? A single tape drive is something like $3K-$4K and simple 2U tape library in the $7K-$8K range.
Definitely a considerable expense. However, if he is only filling up 5% of the tapes every week, what's the point in using tape?
