Is there any way to present Fibre Channel robotic tape libraries and tape drives to virtual machines?

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.2

Issue

  • Is there any way to present Fibre Channel robotic tape libraries and tape drives to virtual machines and take data backup to the tape drive directly from the vm?
  • Can they be attached as direct luns to vms to take backup to it?
  • The HP tape library appears as a scsi device on hypervisor under /proc/scsi/scsi. We want to use the same on VM with passthrough.

Resolution

  • virtio-scsi will be coming in RHEV 3.3 which does support passing through SCSI commands but only for the directlun.
  • If one wants to try that now, one can create a VDSM hook to change a direct lun passed to the guest to use virtio-scsi
  • Details of virtio-scsi support are here including some sample libvirt xml.
  • passthrough of tape device is still not possible and internal feature request is already opened for it which is tracked via Bug#1097653. Open a service request with Red Hat Technical Support team to know the progress of this feature request.

Root Cause

  • No, As of now, there's no way to present Fibre Channel robotic tape libraries and tape drives to virtual machines.
    It wouldn't work since RHEV still exposes the LUN using virtio-blk.
  • The software used to control the tape drive within the guest will most likely use SCSI commands to control the device which aren't supported by virtio-blk.

This solution is part of Red Hat’s fast-track publication program, providing a huge library of solutions that Red Hat engineers have created while supporting our customers. To give you the knowledge you need the instant it becomes available, these articles may be presented in a raw and unedited form.

Comments