Comments on: Connect a fibre attached tape device to a VM on ESX

By: Frank Weyer

Frank Weyer — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:23:41 +0000

Hello,

use this also since several months under ESX 3.5 UP4 with HP Dataprotector 6.10

Have now upgraded to vSphere4.
Can see the Devices on ESX Level and in the virtual machine.
But get errore if i try to write/read data to/from the tape.

any adieas

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 16:54:21 +0000

was testing this out … worked for some time. However after some recent updates … this setup causes the HP NS E1200 to reboot at random … a way to consistently reporduce the problem if you use the HP TL LL test LTO DRIVE ASSESSMENT TEST

By: hazard1yard

hazard1yard — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:30:51 +0000

Just an update, I can see the robot and the tape drive in ESX, if I assign the tape drive as a scsi device to a VM it is all okay and comes up in the VM. As soon as I assign the robot and try to boot the VM it says something about “cannot find file” and does not boot.
Slowly but surely ….

By: hazard1yard

hazard1yard — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:40:32 +0000

Seems to work to a degree, I set up and I can see the tape drive in my Windows VM but I cannot see the robot. In ESX it shows both, with differing SCSI id’s but they both have the same lun number of 0.

So near but yet so far ……..

By: Used Laptop

Used Laptop — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:21:15 +0000

Very informative site.But i have to follow it throughly as i am no computer geek like you man.

By: cititechs

cititechs — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 04:40:38 +0000

This is a proven working method. I’ve done it with a Quantum Scalar i500 and Symantec Backup Exec 11

Only note that I would add is if your library has more than one drive. You need to add a SCSI Device per tape drive to your VM.