HP Ultrium LTO and Adaptec 29160 SCSI card

[jorgitogutierre]

I just bought a new HP 1.6Tb LTO that came with an Adapter SCSI card.

I has trying to connect the tape to a virtual machine running on ESXi but I coudn't do it. I then found this article (http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1012547) that tells that my SCSI card is not supported.

Which are my options?

- Is there anyway to tweak ESXi to let the VM directly access the LTO? I'm running ESX 4 U1 in a HP ML 370 G5

- If I must change the SCSI card, will a new card let me "see" the LTO in the VM?

Thanks for your time

[arobinson]

The experts can weigh in with a little more definitive answer but I had a similar issue with using a SAS card for a Dell Tape Autoloader. The SAS card was supported but I couldn't get it to recognize quite right until... I used Direct Path. Under Hardware->Advanced you can use Direct Path to "attach" a specific PCI device to a specific machine. There are tons of restrictions when you do this some of which are you can't snapshot and you can't use HA. For my setup the backup VM was a dedicated machine that I could backup from time to time and failover didn't matter too much to me so it worked for my situation.

Hope this helps a little bit.

Regards,

Andy Robinson

[asatoran]

Even if you could get it to work, I suspect you'd have poor performance. I had a 39160 (dual channel version of the 29160) and got horrible thoughput to a HP 920 LTO3 drive. I replaced it with a 29320LPE (Ultra 320 instead of 160, and PCIe instead of PCI) and got a more acceptable 600MB/min instead of 4MB/Min, (Yes, FOUR (4) MB!)

I'm running ESX4u1 on a HP DL385 G5 with the 29320 and the LTO3 drive. (The 39160 was on a different host.) I don't know if your ML370 has PCIe slots, but if it does, then there is a very good chance that the 29320 will work. Otherwise, get something on the HCL.