Backup Exec on Hyper V Guest machine

[BEguy]

I have multiple Backup Exec 2014/2015  which I have installed on the Hyper-V Guest machine. The Hyper-V host and gust both have Windows 2012 R2. We are backing up to tape but on few servers the tape drive is not detected by Backup Exec. Is this configuration supported? Any limitations or I am missing out on something?

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Accessing a physical device like a tape drive/autoloader isn't supported. Accessing disk presented via iSCSI would be. You'd need to load BE on a Hyper-V host, or on another Windows-based physical server.

Read below:

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.TECH130609

While this is for ESX, the same applies to Hyper-V. You're going to get very disparate behaviour using an unsupported configuration, which is what you've got now.

Thanks!

[Colin_Weaver]

Just to add to Craig's correct answer

Hyper-V does not have a passthough mechanism in the same way as VMware ESX does and although the latest versions of Hyper-V do have a concept of a virtual SAN adaptor (MS term for passthrough config) - this is intended for disk technologies and Microsoft's own documentation states that tapes are not supported using this ability.