Access fibre-channel tape library through RMAL?
Hi,
We have a requirement to move our BE2010R3 installation (physical machine with fibre channel HBA) to a new virtual machine on BE2012 and I am aware that VMware ESXi does not support FC-connected robotic libraries.
If I put a simple Linux distro on a physical host with HBA connected to the SAN, can I use the Remote Media Agent for Linux to act as a gateway to the library?
I know RMAL simulates a tape library, but can it give access to a real SCSI tape library?
If this is not possible, what is the recommended way of accessing an FC tape library from inside a VM?
Cheers,
Gavin.
The key advice for "do not virtualize the media server" relates to hardware access of storage devices used as backup targets. We do not test or certify any passthrough technology as a target device connection. - This means SCSI, FC, SAS, USB connected drives (tape or disk) that are passed through may experience unpredictable timeouts etc that cause problems.
Storage inside a vmdk held in a datastore and (in theory) iSCSI storage should be OK.
If doing VMware backups you cannot use SAN transport mode inside a VM (not supported by VMware) however HotAdd Transport actually requires the media server to be a VM (which is probably the only reason to virtualize your media server)
Also if running deduplication because the overheards can be large against disk read/write performance, CPU and Memory requirements it is also recommended that physical harwdare is used so that the resources are not affected by sharing with other (virtual) servers.