Can't get tape drive to fully work in VM

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cerberus82
Posts: 1
Joined: Thu Oct 17, 2019 1:23 pm

Thu Oct 17, 2019 1:51 pm

Hi there!
short description of what my scenario is, what i did and what the problem is:

I have a (physical) Win Server 2016 Host machine which is connected to a tape drive via SAS.
On the same machine i have a (Hyper-V based) Win 10 PRO - VM, from which i want to access the tape drive via an archive/backup software (archiware p5).

I installed Tape Redirector Free edition on the physical host as described in the docs, and connected the VM with microsofts iSCSI initiator....

so far so good, no errors to this point.

In my backup-software, i am able to see the shared tape drive, it is displayed with correct values, vendor name etc. etc.

i can execute basic control functions of the tape drive (which is a 16 slot autoloader btw) like updating the inventory... all working fine.

BUT

when i try to restore data from a tape, things going wrong:

after submitting a restoring job, the tape drive correctly swap tapes, rewinds it (if neccessary) up to the point where data transfer should start.
but then nothing happens....

backup software displays "waiting for data"..... progress stays at 0kb
tape drive's hardware display claims "idle"

then a couple of seconds later the backup software aborts the job with the message "I_T nexus loss"

and the physical host shows a popup message something like "Starwind Virtual San crashes due to a serious error, please save log and dump file...."
after this happened, i'm not able to restart the starwind management console anymore, it always shows the popup message after the virtual san splash screen comes up.
i need to restart the physical machine to be able to restart starwind again.

any suggestions what could cause this behaviour is highly appreciated.

thx in advance
Boris (staff)
Staff
Posts: 805
Joined: Fri Jul 28, 2017 8:18 am

Sat Oct 19, 2019 4:16 am

Could you collect the logs using StarWind Log Collector and submit them to us? If you see *.mdmp (crash dump) files in your StarWind installation folder, we would like to have a look at the latest related one. You can send the files via the file sharing service of your choice and PM me the link to download them.
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