Posts made by Donahue

@dbeato yeah, I should probably do that. I should be able to move everything over to my backup host and do it that way.

I've added some more disks (going from 5 to 7) and I am trying to figure out of I can expand the array without a reboot, using iDrac. It doesn't look like I can, it looks like I have to reboot and go into the setup to expand the VD. But before I do that, does anyone know if it can be done via iDrac while online? Or does anyone have any easy to understand documentation for adding OMSA?

I read about the Hololens2 yesterday, it seems promising. The $3500 price tag isn't ideal but if it worked might be worth it. But I don't know how far I could test or confirm that a system like this found function for us without just buying it and testing it. It may have to end up being one a speculation cost if it doesnt work out, but all of this stuff is completely new to us. I think we have applications for both VR and AR, depending on the circumstances, but I think that AR is probably the harder one to pull off.

@JaredBusch Ideally, AR

I am looking into the possibility for work. We make large industrial equipment and I want to see how feasible the technology is to be able to project our 3D cad models AR style. I've experimented with this some over the last few days and I can get it to work on my phone using .obj and .gITF files. I think the next step is to buy some goggles and see what I can do. Anyone use them for work or games?

@taurex said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

I've just installed on bare metal, but now I've run into an issue where backup tape jobs are not supported in my version of Veeam. I can backup files, but not VM's unless I upgrade to "enterprise" veeam

Why wouldn't you simply select the existing Veeam backup folders/files and archive them to tape? Here is an excerpt from the official Veeam guide: "When a backup to tape job runs, it does not create new backups: it locates already existing backups and copies them from backup repository to tape. You need to set the source of the tape job: jobs and/or backup repositories."

What that is describing is the "backup to tape" feature, which requires the next license up from the one I currently have. For now I have settled on just backing up the actual files located in the storage repository. I think it's mostly a matter of how veeam sees the files. The method available to me copies them as standard files and I would probably have to do more work manually when I go to restore, because veeam might not know which files belong to which backup jobs. The other option, which requires the better license, implies that veeam will continue to be aware of what the files are, and when I needed to restore, veeam would know what to do and how to do it, and it would require less effort on my part.

I have not tested a restore from tape yet though, so I might still have a few details incorrect.

I've just installed on bare metal, but now I've run into an issue where backup tape jobs are not supported in my version of Veeam. I can backup files, but not VM's unless I upgrade to "enterprise" veeam

we probably have about 8-10 TB of real data, and I want to be able to store EVERYTHING on the tapes. I have two online backup copies in two locations, so this is my third and offline copy. The main backups are to disk, and so the tape is just backing up the disk and I think there is going to be less of an issue with transfer rates. The host that has the veeam VM has no other VM's on it currently, it's only running this one instance. That's one reason just going bare metal on it makes some sense.

My plan right now is to run the backup every week and have like 5 tapes in rotation, one onsite and 4 at the bank. My disk backups should account for any archiving we need, tapes are really more for DR that for casual restores.

@taurex said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

Hey @Donahue. Have you looked at free Starwind Tape Redirector by any chance? It basically allows you to present a tape drive attached to the host as an ISCSI LUN to your Veeam B&R's Windows Server VM so the backup software would see it directly installed. Wouldn't this solve your problem?

I have, but you have to be running there VSAN too, which I don't have.

@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

What is the plan for off-site storage with tapes? A service like Iron Mountain or someone takes them home and puts them in a closet?

safe deposit box at the bank

I'm not currently using tapes yet. I bought some LTO-7 tapes, but they've been on my shelf for like a year because other projects came up. I had been planning like 1 a week or some similar interval.

my plan had been to use real tape, as we wanted to physically move it off site. But things may change

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

I'm in a similar situation as we are also setting up a tape backup.
However we are on xcp-ng as our general hypervisor of choice.

Problem for us that we want to do backup to disk and then disk to tape. Today's tape drives requires about 700 MByte/sec of data to be happy. And if you are talking about many TBs of data then a hypervisor starts to make things very complicated.

I'm leaning towards having a dedicated server with lots of disk and tape drive/library over SAS. Let it do the actual disk to tape transfer.

And then run VMs on another host that actually does the backup to disk. Something along those lines.

yeah, we're already backing up to disk, I'm just getting the second layer sorted out.

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

I researched that not long ago and you can do pass-through in Hyper-V but it's not supported by Microsoft.

So you could pass through the entire SAS controller.

I can't do the entire controller, the VM is running on an array on that controller.

About a year ago I had this thread discussing starting to use tape for backups. Well, it never got implemented and now I am just getting around to being able to make this work. However, I am running into issues that didn't come up in our planning and I think I need to modify the plan and or scrap it and come up with something else.

Right now I have a Veeam inside a 2012R2 VM running on Hyper-V 2019. My tape drive is connected via SAS to the host. I am trying to get Veeam to talk to the tape drive but I ran into a glaring problem. I cannot seem pass through a tape drive to my VM. Am I right about this? I can't pass through the entire SAS controller, it would have had to been the drive itself.

I see two options moving forward.

1. Run Veeam physically and not inside a VM
2. scrap the idea of tape and convince my management to consider cloud options.

Thoughts? I am in the process of completely reevaluating how we are setup and what exactly we would do if we encountered issues that required us to need these backups.

I just did it. The guide still applies, apart from getting 15 and not 13.

Just found this:
https://github.com/Ichnafi/NC-Office-Wrapper

@bnrstnr said in file sharing in the 21st century:

Why do you want to move away from your Windows Server so badly? You don't mention anything (that I can see), other than broadening your horizons. It's probably the best bet for your CAD files.

a list of benefits that we would get from something like NC:

• no MS licensing dependencies
• good remote access
• versioning
• the ability to share with outside parties or have them upload to us
• better searching
• tags

There is probably more I forgot.

yeah, it might be back to the drawing board for me. I will really think about separating our the storage, based on purpose.

On a side note, I am going to be spinning up a NC for personal use at home, it will work great for me in that regard.

@scottalanmiller said in file sharing in the 21st century:

@Donahue said in file sharing in the 21st century:

There is a LOT more to a CAD system then just check in and check out. It's the other bits that don't work well for us.

Yes, but in theory, enough $$$ should work to make it good

FIFY