The Veeam Cookbook Series

A simple step by step no frills approach to achieving your goal

Recipe: Adding a new Tape Server to Veeam Backup & Replication

Expected deliverables:

A Tape Server role for Veeam Backup & Replication which can be used to copy backups on tape systems.

Time to complete: 5 minutes

Ingredients:

Recommended: Physical Server with 8 Cores and 32GB RAM for the tape server role, minimum requirements are lower but can reduce performance drastically. Please see the links to further resources at the end of this page.
Windows Server Operating system at least server Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2. Can be 2008 R2 SP1 however 2012 R2 should be minimum you should use.
Local Administrative account access on your server.
Veeam Backup & Replication installed.
System is added as a Managed Windows Server (The Veeam Practical Guide Series - Adding Microsoft Windows Servers)

Before you start:

The Veeam Backup & Replication tape server role supports physical and virtual tapes and libraries for the LTO3 or newer standard. Partitions of libraries are supported but must contain only one generation of LTO drives.

Assumptions:

This guide assumes that a supported physical connection between the tape library and the Tape Server is prepared and all necessary drivers are installed in the Windows Server operating system.

Method:

Open the Veeam Backup and Replication console and select Tape Infrastructure on the bottom left menu.
Select the top of the Tape Infrastructure tree. From the top menu choose “Add Tape Server”
Choose the desired server which has been pre-added or start the wizard to add a new server, then klick Next.
Klick Next to accept the network traffic rules if they suit your needs.
Review the Tape server settings and klick on Apply to start installing the required components which will include the Transport and Tape Proxy roles.
On the Apply page make sure everything was successfully performed and klick Next.
Leave the checkbox to start the inventory enabled and klick Finish.
On the tree view on left side see the “Last 24 Hours” section to look for the discovery job and it´s status to make sure that the discovery was successful.
The discovered libraries and drives should be visible now if you expand the Libraries tree.
If you have free tapes in your system present, they should be visible in the tree view under “Media Pools – Free”. Your Tape server is ready to be used.

Links to Resources: