Have never heard of this one but may give it a go. I did test another VTL and it seemed to work good. One of those free ones the name escapes me right now.

Starwind has one but it is windows based only. 

That's the one I tested and it worked pretty good.

My VTL experience is the IBM TS7720 connected to IBM Mainframes. 

With object storage and immutability, the main reason I like tape is for the price, and the physical airgap.    

What are you doing with VTL that can’t be achieved with object storage? 

Well the VTL part was just for testing. The real project is for an AWS tape gateway (customer requirements). I just wanted to get used to the whole Tenant to Tape setup in Cloud Connect again.

I had not played with it for awhile so wanted to see if anything new in V12 and if the reporting had improved with VeeamONE

Ah i see. That tape gateway is pretty cool. Backup to disk, fire it off to AWS, then off to tape in cold storage. 

I guess it saves having to purchase your own library/tapes, and I assume that AWS are ejecting those after a while. 

The only thing i like about hosting my own, is lets say my whole environment is toast, including Veeam. I can start reading my tapes and getting data back and importing VM’s. (it would take weeks but possible).  I don’t know the process for AWS to gather up all my tapes and scan them to show me what’s on them. 

I have a bunch of my servers all backup their config data to a VM, server configs, VMware, SRM, switches etc. and back that up as well to tape. so once Veeam comes back up, I could recreate my VMware environment, dSwitches, DC’s and get going pretty quick. 

One issue that I remember which is important was to make sure you ejected and export the tape, otherwise AWS keeps it in its S3 which is $$$$$. Things might have changed someone or it might have been that I did not have the auto eject and export clicked in the GUI.

I like having a tape server too but if you have tons of these jobs and your tape drive or drives decides to die you could have a big waiting list of jobs.

Yeah, turning that on in the Veeam job settings is the best way to ensure it is ejected.

Oh ya, I have to remember I have big libraries with many LTO8 drives so a failure is just a slight slowdown in the backups.  As a small customer having a single or even dual drive setup can be a pain point.  This is great info. I figured it would have been automatic.  

@Chris.Childerhose Great info as well to enable it in Veeam. 

I’ve used Starwind VTL on their Linux appliance for vSphere. We had customer, who needed to migrate his physical tapes to cloud, so we used this VM for the migration. Contact them. Their support helped me with configuration.