To make a long story short, after having sold several VMware ESXi servers to our customers we came to find out from VMware technical support that despite what some of thier documentation may explicitly state, they do not support passthrough of Tape Drives in any fasion, even when directly passing the SCSI card to the guest via VMDirectPath and Intel's VT-d. After looking into many differnt alternatives I believe we have found the most desirable workaround to this problem to be hosting the tape drive on another mini-pc as an iSCSI Target. However, we do not have the budget for a copy of StarWind Server after having already spent 20k on a very nice Intel 5500 series Nehelem based server.
I have read here and in other forums of people successfully using Linux based iSCSI Target software to publish Tape Drives, however I have not as yet found a walkthrough or tutorial on how to do it that wasnt 6 years old and/or based on software thats no longer availiable. We looked into OpenFiler, but it will not do SCSI passthrough of non-block devices, such as Sequential Access tape drives. The linux software "iscsitarget" otherwise known as iSCSI EnterpriseTarget System seams to have an unofficial patch availiable that will allow SCSI passthrough, but I havnt been able to get that to work either.
I have however, as I stated previously, seen several posts on these forums and others of people who have managed to get this scenario to work in the past. I was desperatly hoping that one of those individuals that have managed to get this working would be kind enough to provide a detailed step-by-step of how they managed it. Any help, however, on this subject would be greatly appreciated. My sanity thanks you :smileyhappy:
Kirk