How to connect a SAS LTO tape libary to vSphere?

[jason15300]

Hi guys,

I am working on a Disaster Recovery solution and needed some advice on how to connect a PowerVault TL2000 to vSphere 6.5.

Hardware:

2 ESXi hosts running VM with VMotion, DRS.

1 NAS running FreeNas

1 switch which connects the NAS and ESXis together

LTO SAS tape library

Software:

FreeNas 11

ESXi 6.5 (free/evaluation version)

vSphere 6.5

What is the best way of connecting the LTO to our DR solution as it will need to take weekly backups of the VMs

Thanks,

Jason

[Finikiez]

Hi!

You should look for another solution as it's not supported to connect tape drives\libraries to ESXi host

VMware Knowledge Base

You need to have a dedicated physical host to work with tape device.

[jason15300]

Thank you for the help, what solution would you recomend for this?

[Finikiez]

If backup to tape library is a must you need to find additional physical server and use it as a backup host. Also you need a software which will write backups to tape library. For example Veeam backup and replication, Zerto, Nakivo and etc.

You can also try to passthrough SAS controller into virtual machine where you can run backup software, however there is no guarantee that this will work.

Or you can just forget about backup to tape and backup VMs somewhere else to disks.

[daphnissov]

I notice you didn't list any sort of backup application in your list. Since you have the 2000, get a physical server with a SAS card, install Windows and Veeam, and connect the tape library. Veeam can back up VMs to tape using that library which you can then take off-site.