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Tl2000 Magazine Slot Numbers

The PowerVault TL2000 enables organisations to automate their backup and archive processes to reduce the need for manual intervention and the risk of human error. The TL2000 2U library supports up to two LTO5, LTO6, LTO7 or LTO8 drives with 24 slots. Front panel component descriptions (continued) Number Component Description Cartridge magazine The tape library has a single cartridge magazine that can hold up to 9 data cartridges, or 8 data cartridges with a 1-slot I/O station. Column 5/Tier 1 in the cartridge magazine can be configured as a 1-slot I/O station.

In this guide, I hope to demonstrate the means to connect to your TL2000 Tape Library with Veeam. I found that there wasn’t much straight-forward info on the subject, so I hope this can be of use to anyone else in my position.

A long-overdue problem

Last year, I picked up a stack of rack-mount server equipment for use as a lab environment. My goal was to familiarize myself with enterprise equipment and learn skills I could apply professionally. The entire stack was a package deal, so I didn’t pick out any of the individual components. As a result, I ended up with several devices that I was clueless about how to use.

There were the “simple” devices, such as the R320s and the R710s. While learning their intricacies took some time, ultimately they’re just computers and I got them working in no time. Not so simple were devices such as the direct-attach storage array, managed Cisco switches, and a tape library.

After lots of research and tinkering, I got the switches configured (in an admittedly simple flat VLAN, as was all I needed for lab purposes), and connected to the datastore and familiarized myself with iSCSI. I never quite got around to figuring out the tape library though. It just never seemed pressing and as such was never made a priority.

Why now?

Recently, I’ve decided to offload this equipment (which will likely come as no surprise to anyone who’s kept 22U of servers in their office before– 1.4 Kilowatts and LOUD!) But I wanted to get around to figuring out the tape library before I sold it. I didn’t want to pass up an opportunity to learn on an enterprise-level skill. In addition, I needed to wipe the tapes before I offered them to anyone else.

The previous owner had included a box of LTO4 tapes, as well as those that were still loaded in the unit (though I hadn’t even figured out how to open the bays to see them yet). He had said there was still data on the tapes, and asked that I be responsible with them. I’m not sure what the data was, but I wanted to honor that assurance by wiping the tapes before I sold them.

Getting started: What is this thing?

I started figuring what I was working with. I began by simply powering the unit on and seeing what happened. As it initialized, I heard the drives internally whirring about, presumably performing startup diagnostics and scans of the tape cartridge bays. After the lengthy boot process was complete, I was faced with a simple interface on the built-in display. I poked around for a while and determined that my particular library had two drives, and was already loaded nearly full with tapes.

With further exploration, I found the options to control different mechanisms of the library. Most importantly, I found the function to open the tape magazines. Up to this point, I had not been sure how to add or remove tapes, and was beginning to suspect you had to open the chassis to do so.

I discovered I was wrong when I found the controls to eject the two tape magazines. Since I received the TL2000, I had suspected the two plastic pieces on either side of the display to be where cartridges lived. Much to my dismay, they had never budged, and there was no release mechanism to be found. At last though, I had them open. I ejected each magazine and removed the tapes, bringing my total count up to 48 cartridges.

For a while, I continued experimenting with these controls. I figured out how to manually move cartridges between slots, clean the drive heads, eject individual cartridges via the I/O slot, and more. Once I was comfortable with this, I set out to attempt to read and write to the library.

Interacting in software

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I began searching for guides on backing up to the TL2000. And what I found was… pretty much nothing. I think that, because tape usage is uncommon in the consumer space, there weren’t many guides surrounding it’s use. There is the official Dell documentation, which of course I read through. At over two hundred pages and very technical at that, I didn’t find much help there in my initial research.

What I was able to figure out was this: the vast majority of users of tape libraries seemed to be using a backup product called Veeam, so that’s where I started. Veeam is a Windows-based graphical application, so I would need a Windows box to connect to the TL2000.

The four R710s in my rack are configured in a vSphere cluster, so I created a VM for Windows Server. I subsequently installed Veeam by downloading the Community Edition ISO, and everything seemed to be working. So… now what?

I now needed to figure out how to connect to and interact with the library from my new client. Checking out the rear of the TL2000, I saw that it had an ethernet port. I’m very familiar with NAS operation, so this was promising. Unfortunately, reading the docs showed that it was used exclusively as a management port. Further reading indicated the only I/O with the library was accomplished through the 4 SAS ports on the back.

Connecting with SAS

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I had never used SAS before , so I just started trying stuff to see what worked. The first thing I did was utilize vSphere’s ability to directly pass PCI/PCIe components to guest machines by passing one of the SAS expansion cards on the R710 to the Windows VM. Booting back into windows, I saw the SAS cards show up in device manager. One step closer!

Next, I connected one of the SAS ports from the TL2000 into the passed-through SAS port on the R710. And there it was! the tape drive showed up in device manager. Furthermore, launching Veeam showed that the library was being listed in the Tape infrastructure tab.

Almost there…

By exploring the Veeam interface and reading their official documentation, I realized that none of the tapes that I knew to be in the library were shown under the ‘media’ tab where they should have been. I experimented with various settings for a while but never could get Veeam to recognize them. Eventually, it occurred to me that there were a total of four SAS ports on the library and I had only connected one. I had assumed that the number of connections was a matter of bandwidth, but perhaps the each served different purposes.

So, I passed through another SAS adapter to the VM and connected the remaining three ports. I powered Windows back up, and there they were! Not only were the tapes now being listed under the ‘media’ tab, but the second tape drive had appeared. Reading through docs yet again revealed that there are two SAS ports per drive, so connecting them all would allow Veeam to interact with both of the drives in the library simultaneously.

Inventorying and wiping the tapes

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Looking through the ‘media’ tab, I saw that there were a number of tapes present, but Veeam was unable to display metadata such as capacity or free space for any of them. After reading through Veeam’s documentation, I found that the first step was to inventory the library. In doing so, the library would grab each tape in turn, load it into one of the two drives, and return metadata such as available space and which collection it belonged to for Veeam to catalog.

The inventory process took nearly an hour for a full load of 23 tapes, but after it completed I saw that each of the tapes was showing the appropriate ~763GB of space for LTO4 cartridges, and had varying amounts of free space.

Wiping the tapes

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With the tapes inventoried, I moved on to wiping them. I selected all the tapes and told Veeam to conduct full wipes on all of them. This meant going end to end on each tape, overwriting whatever data may have been present. I started this process around 11 at night, and was somewhat annoyed to find the process still running when I began work the next day. I was forced to leave all the equipment running in my office while the wipe continued, presenting a loud distraction to my workday.

Eventually though, the process finished. I checked Veeam’s activity log and saw that it was taking a touch over 2 hours to wipe each tape. Plus several minutes of overhead for moving and validating cartridges.

After work, I swapped out all the wiped tapes for another batch of 23, and followed the same process of inventorying and wiping them. I continued with this process until all 48 tapes were inventoried and wiped. With that step done, I began contemplating what to do next.

Next steps: What should I do with this?

If I actually wanted to use Veeam with the TL2000 to generate my own archives, the next step would have been to ‘import’ the cartridges. This is the process by which Veeam will create a backup target from a pool of tapes, assigning each tape sequences and generating info on how much storage that pool is able to back up, as well as other important info. Currently, all the tapes were showing a sequence number of ‘1’, because they did not yet belong to any pools.

Ultimately, I decided to forgo this step. I briefly considered keeping the TL2000 and integrating it into my backup schema, but in the end decided against it. My “production” home server is not a rackmount, and I have no immediate plans of racking my home setup. Keeping the TL2000 would have meant integrating a large, loud piece of equipment in my office that didn’t fit well with the rest of my setup.

With this decided, I elected not to import the tapes, because this would involve Veeam writing certain data about the storage pools to the tapes such as their sequence number and which pool they belonged to. This would require the next owner to re-initialize the tapes if they used a product other than Veeam to interact with the tape library.

Conclusions

So, I was done. I pulled out the last of the tapes and got them boxed up ready to hand to the next owner. I felt good knowing that I was not putting the previous owner’s data at risk by giving them away unwiped, and I had learned a great deal about the usage of SAS, Veeam, and tape libraries as a whole.

While I am by no means an expert from a few days of tinkering, it’s comforting to know that if I’m ever confronted with maintaining a tape library in a professional environment, or even just decide to utilize tape for my own needs at home, I have a brief familiarity that will allow me to make informed decisions.

If you’re attempting to work with your own tape library, I encourage you to leave comments. Hopefully I can share other tips I learned along the way. I wanted to write this so that others would have the guide that I never could find. I would be happy to hear if it’s helped you. Thanks for reading!

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