Backup - Veeam Support best practices for using tape

Backup it's a backup safety. One of the most popular backup archiving options is tape. It is a cheap, reliable solution that provides protection against cryptoviruses and hacker attacks. Additionally, the tape is offline when not in use in the charger. Additionally, with many new features, Veeam tape backup solutions now support vSphere, Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, and Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Linux backups.

With Veeam, IT administrators can enjoy flexible backup and off-storage options while following the 3-2-1 rule for backup and disaster recovery. This blog post provides tips and considerations to help you create a solid tape archiving infrastructure.

When it comes to backup storage strategies, Veeam recommends keeping your initial backup chain short (7-14 points) and using a general-purpose drive that will allow you to recover data in the shortest possible time. Long-term storage should come from secondary and tertiary storage, which typically have a much lower storage cost per TB, but in return, the RTO when restoring from such storage can take much longer. Here is a graphic that illustrates this scenario.

How to deploy and use a tape library with Veeam

When planning and implementing an implementation project, follow the recommendations below:

It is recommended that you configure your tape library for use only by Veeam Backup & Replication. Using it with any third party tape recording software (for example in an evaluation lab) may prevent the other software from recording.

To streamline your workflow, use barcode tapes. Before using the tapes, check the integrity of the barcodes and ensure that the barcode reader is turned on. If you have multiple libraries, make sure the barcodes are unique across your infrastructure.

To increase capacity, please use the latest LTO. As of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3, Veeam now supports LTO-8.

If you plan to use encryption for archived data, consider using hardware encryption (implemented in LTO-4 and later). Software encryption may degrade performance.

Do not use hardware compression for compressed Veeam backups. Double compression will not provide any benefit and may even increase the file size of the tape.

Install and check the following:

The latest drivers for your tape library.

Please note that only original (OEM) drivers are supported. The drivers shipped with Microsoft Windows are not recommended.

The latest firmware of the changer and controller. SCSI changers are supported.

You will need a tape server that will handle most of the data transfer tasks when archiving to tape. Check the following entry requirements:

This should be a physical machine or a virtual machine connected via iSCSI, as direct forwarding is not supported.

Using a Windows 2008 R2 computer as a tape server is not recommended due to possible performance degradation. Instead, use Windows Server 2012 or later for better performance and a seamless experience.

A best practice is to provide a direct connection from the tape server to the repository to improve performance and specify this preferred repository in tape server connections.

If you plan to create synthetic backups, it is not recommended to use deduplication storage.

You should also consider using tape-enabled GFS media pools with Veeam. This feature allows you to easily set up long-term storage of backups on tape, as shown in the figure below:

A new stage of the GFS media pool

If you plan to archive a large number of files to tape (over 500,000 per job), consider using any commercial version of the SQL Server for Veeam configuration database to support these operations. The configuration database stores information about all files backed up by Veeam Backup & Replication, and using the SQL Server Express version (with a 10 GB limit on database size) can lead to significant performance degradation. If the database size reaches 10 GB, all Veeam operations will stop.

To load or download tapes from the library, use import-export sockets. If you must perform these operations manually, be sure to stop the tape jobs, stop the tape server, perform the manual operation, start the server, rescan or run a library inventory (to recognize the transferred tapes), and then restart the tape job.

If the tapes have barcodes, you can rescan them.

If the tapes do not have barcodes, an inventory must be carried out.

Note: For more information about tape infrastructure and operations, see the Veeam Backup & Replication for VMware or Hyper-V User Guide.

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