LTO 5 Library

I had the joy of finishing off an LTO 5 library install today. It is a bit of beast with 96 tape slots available and 4 drive bays.

First problem I had was that the robot arm was stuck after powering it on, so power off, pull a couple drives out and see if anything is blocking it, nothing obvious, so it gave it a bit of twiddle and prod, powered back on and everything is splendid.

We have the 4 drives but in a typical HP mental licensing move we are only licensed for 48 tape slots. So they charge you to buy a load of hardware then make you pay a licence fee to use it all. Imagine if you bought a Truck from but you only were allowed to use the first half of the trailer unless you paid an additional license fee, would you  think you had got a good deal? How about if boughtV12 Ferrari but your initial licence only allowed you to use it as V6, but you could pay Ferrari an extra wodge for the other cylinders if you needed them later. A mad way to do business.

Anyway, the tape drives use Fibre channel and have two connections per drive for multipathing. No there is very little documentation on how this is all set up and I couldn’t find any DSM for the MPIO on the servers like there is for our old EVA SAN. So It was a case of plug it in to the switches then see what the backup servers see.

One of the reasons we have kept our FC switches just for the backup is it allows a lot more flexibility in our environment, we will be getting a second library to replace out two LTO 3 libraries and we can then have both of our backup server seeing both libraries and can run jobs on either, if we get some hardware issues we can then mix and match as needed, the alternative SAS connectors would require some investment in extra hardware and loss of that flexibility as each server would only see the drives and libraries it was attached to.

Back to the plot, with the drives fibred in to the switches and added to the backup zone, the servers (Windows 2008 R2) could see two of each drive, which was a good thing. On 2003 the MPIO connections could be seen in the normal computer manager, but on 2008 R2 it is separate program and to be honest doesn’t actually tell much and is really quite confusing and pointless, not everything is better in 2008. Kicked off the Backup Exec 2010 devices wizard and added the BE drivers for the LTO 5 (Windows had already loaded it's own) and the run the wizard again to add the libraries, not that there is a direct connection between the servers and the library like there is on an MSL 6000.

In to the BE console and there was HP 5 library with 4 tape drives and all happy as it could be, I can only assume it talks to the library through the tape drives, hopefually all of them as if it was onlysay drive 1 and that went down you would the use of the whole library.

For once it was a lot simpler than I thought it would be and I probably spent more time Googling how to set it up than I spent actually setting up, a small one page bit of documentation could have covered it, perhaps that is covered under the license for the extra tape slots.