LTO-9 Support Details for Veeam Backup & Replication 11

This issue occurs due to the lengthy initialization process for new LTO-9 tapes, which occurs when the tape is inserted into the tape drive for the first time. During this initialization process, optimization occurs, which may take up to 20-120 minutes. While this operation is happening, the tape drive is locked and unavailable until the initialization completes. The duration of unavailability is longer than expected by Veeam Backup & Replication, which causes jobs and tasks to timeout and report a failure.

A hotfix is being developed to prevent Tape Backup jobs and other tape-related tasks from failing due to the lengthy inaccessibility period during the initialization of an LTO-9 tape. Instead, the tape jobs and tasks will wait while an uninitialized LTO-9 tape is optimized when first loaded into the tape drive. It should be noted that while this will prevent a Tape Job from failing, it will cause the Tape Backup jobs that attempt to use an uninitialized LTO-9 tape to run for longer than expected.

In the next major release of Veeam Backup & Replication after version 11a, there are plans to implement a solution to automatically trigger initialization when new LTO-9 tapes are inserted into a library managed by Veeam Backup & Replication.