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LTO-9 Support Details for Veeam Backup & Replication 11

KB ID: 4213
Product: Veeam Backup & Replication | 11
Published: 2021-09-27
Last Modified: 2022-05-16
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Challenge

When using Veeam Backup & Replication 11 or 11a before P20211211, Tape Backup jobs and other tape-related tasks may fail for up to 15-30 minutes after a new uninitialized LTO-9 tape is loaded into the Tape Drive.

Tasks will fail with an error similar to:

Failed to inventory tape in Drive 1. (Server: ..., Library: ..., Drive ID: ...) Error: The device is not ready

Unable to exchange medium in library. The tape device is not ready
This will only occur the first time a new uninitialized LTO-9 tape is inserted into a tape drive.
Log Example
ERR |The device is not ready.
>> |Tape error: '21' (The device is not ready.)
>> |--tr:Error code: 0x00000015
>> |--tr:TapeHandle failed to get tape media parameters.
>> |--tr:Tape initialization FAILED.
>> |An exception was thrown from thread [3296].

Cause

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.

Solution

As this initialization time with LTO-9 tapes is unavoidable, new uninitialized LTO-9 tapes must be manually moved into the tape drive using native library tools before they are used with Veeam Backup & Replication.

 

Starting with Veeam Backup & Replication 11a P20211211, tape jobs will now identify and display the media calibration process in the Action log and will no longer time out should this process takes longer than 15 minutes.

More Information

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.

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LTO-9 is only supported by Veeam Backup & Replication 11 and higher.

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