I know Veeam was not put on this earth to do backups to tape and especially file backups to tape..  However I have a requirement for it at a site.

There are 4 large (10TB each) volumes presented from the 3PAR storage array to a physical server.  The data stored on these volumes has to be backed up to tape.  I have a tape library with 2 x LTO6 fibre channel drives.

I went through the process of creating a tape media pool and specified 2 drives to be used simultaneously and set the file to tape job with the 4 volumes selected as the backup source.

As it turns out, file to tape jobs do not use parallel processing..  What I had to do was create two jobs each with 2 of the 10TB volumes as the source and then target them to the same tape media pool.  This is working OK at the moment, problems will arise if the balance of data across the volumes differs two much and I end up with one job taking a lot longer than the other to run.  If that happens all I can do is try and balance the 4 volumes between the two backup jobs to have the smallest difference between the two jobs in terms of data being backed up.

I am running Veeam 9.5 Update 1, from what I understand there will be no change with update 2.  Maybe there will some more tape improvements in Veeam 10??  I’m told we are going to find out about Veeam 10 at VeeamOn 2017, just another reason I’m looking forward to it!

(Yes, I know the image at the top of this page is huge..  I’m working on that, css is not one of my strengths)