Veeam added tape support in version 7, we immediately started testing it, but never found the performance and stability to completely trust on the tape support for all our backups. We just weren't sure the daily tape copies were put to tape before the end of the day and in some cases weren't sure they'd be put to tape at all! So we also used third-party solutions to get the back-up files safeley on tape. We eleminated this somewhat after v8 which did improve a lot, but still...

After struggling with tape support in Veeam since version 7, tests with version 9 update 1 (1491) finally showed promosing results! And after using tape in v9 for about a week now.... waking up, going to work en checking the veeam tape results from last night isn't a controlling factor of cortisol-stress level anymore!
All jobs (a copy of incrementals) succeeded easiliy within our timeframe with good performance!

The changes I like most

Global Media Pools

Global Media Pools make it possible to share tapes in pools accross several libraries and tape proxies, this adds a separate layer of configuration for the pool and its tapes as they are now decoupled from the library.

You can see we currently do not have multiple libraries, but Veeam does have a preview here.

Parallel Processing

Together with Global Media Pools parallel processing, especially when using the per-VM backup file chains, gives an amazing performance boost and adds flexibility and ease for your tape and backup-to-tape job management.

Still some things to wish for

Veeam also adds GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) retetion for tape jobs. And though GFS sounds cool, it's a seperate job type/media pool type which does not save the incrementals, but always creates (synthetic/virtual) fulls with a GFS retention scheme (choices are weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly). So the incrementals aren't included!

A single retention scheme for hourly/daily incrementals, weekly fulls, monthly fulls and yearly fulls is still not possible. But sort of doable when combining the normal media pool with GFS and seperate tape jobs for each.

But when doing daily incrementals and weekly fulls with the normal mode job and the monlthies and yearlies with the GFS... BUT in the weekend the monthlies and yearlies are created. Veeam also creates the full for the normal job, which seems a bit redundant... (if that even exist in backup space :)). Maybe it's possible, but i haven't found a wat to do so. anyone from veeam reading this? :)

Also GFS doesn't support paralell processing, check here.

Our solution to this?

To get the GFS like retention we want, including the incrementals, we manually protect (automated through powershell) the monthlies en yearlies and add "YYYY-MM" to the description field of each tape and keep the protected tapes off our daily printed tapelist, you just have to make sure the tapes contain (synthetic/virtual) fulls. With this solution it's possible to keep the tapes in the same media pool, have no redundant tape copies of the same set and unprotect the tapes based on the description field after the retention period.

Our retention scheme and a simple powershell used for our own GFS solution:

Github - VEEAM Tape Protect-Retire GFS.ps1