Shared Tape Library

Question

We have a scenario where the customer has a Tape Library currently connected to Bacula. Due to an issue with Bacula, they are carrying out a reconstruction or recovery process of the existing backups, which they intend to run from Monday to Friday.

At the same time, the customer wants to incorporate Veeam Backup & Replication to perform Backup to Tape jobs during the weekends, using the same Tape Library.

The question is to determine how feasible and advisable this approach is, considering that both applications would use the same library at different times, and what considerations or limitations should be taken into account to avoid conflicts in the access and control of the tape drives and media.

matheusgiovanini · Answer

I validated this scenario against the official Veeam documentation, and there is an important consideration.

Veeam does not support sharing the same tape devices with third-party tape-recording software such as Bacula. The documentation explicitly mentions this scenario and recommends that, if the Tape Library needs to be shared, a partition of the library should be dedicated exclusively to Veeam.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbr/userguide/tape_supported_devices.html

My concern is not only the potential conflict when accessing the drives. Even if Bacula runs from Monday to Friday and Veeam only during the weekends, both applications would have their own understanding of the media and what was written to them. This could create an operational risk of using the wrong tape, as well as conflicts involving inventory, load/unload operations, media movement, and tape management.

For this reason, I would not recommend using the same library partition and simply switching between bacula and veeam according to a schedule.

A more appropriate architecture, assuming the library model supports logical partitioning, would be something like:

Logical Library / Partition 1 → Bacula

Dedicated drive
Dedicated slots
Dedicated control path

Logical Library / Partition 2 → Veeam

Dedicated drive
Dedicated slots
Dedicated control path

This way, the same physical library could still be used, but each application would have its own logical resources, avoiding contention for the same devices and, more importantly, preventing one application from managing media belonging to the other.

I believe the exact implementation should be validated against the customer’s library model, including the number and generation of LTO drives, connectivity (FC/SAS), and whether the library supports logical partitioning and separate control paths.

If the library supports the required partitioning, I would prefer this approach over having Bacula and Veeam alternately control the same tape devices. Otherwise, I would recommend keeping the tape resources separated between the two solutions.

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