Operational Defect Database
BugZero found this defect 966 days ago.
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Veeam | kb4213
LTO-9 Support Details for Veeam Backup & Replication 11
Last update date:
5/16/2022
Affected products:
Veeam Backup & Replication
Affected releases:
11
Fixed releases:
No fixed releases provided.
Description:
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:
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.
