VM and LTO

How will it all be set up?
Is the tape drive on the server hardware you are using for virtualising or seperate hardware?

My thought would be have physical box with the tape drive attached and something like Backup Exec.
Put the agent on the virtual server(s) and backup as you might do with all physical boxes.

If the 2003 vm needs direct access to the drive on the hardware it is virtualised on I think vmware could see it if you configure the vm correctly as they support scsi.
 
It's a PE 2900 III that’s running SBS2003 that backs up to an internal LTO-3 drive (U320) using the SBS tweaked version of Windows backup.

With some additional ram, and possibly a second processor, I can’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be able to handle a virtualised version of SBS2003 and a couple of additional VMs.

The complication is the LTO drive. I’m not going to be able to get rid of it for a while yet.
 
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In Hyper-V you cannot have SCSI passthrough / emulation to guest VMs.
Obviously you can connect it to the host, but I'd question why you were doing virtualisation at all with such a small setup (ie, in a situation where you don't have a spare box).

Off the top of my head you might be able to do SCSI passthrough with ESX guests.
 
Even if it was possible, the amount of time and effort it'll take you to p2v the SBS, buy the extra ram and cpu, all the hastle and downtime - I would have thought it would be much easier (and cheaper if your time costs money) to buy a new box and be done with it.
 
A new box will be the most likely outcome.

I was just exploring a possible option as the PE 2900 is massively underutilised at the moment.

There are other servers onsite but they aren’t really relevant to the question.
 
ESX(i) has SCSI passthrough but only on certain SCSI controllers I think.

Sounds a bit of a ball ache on an already functioning system and also quite tricky to test and get working without causing downtime.
 
It's all generally as I thought and probably not worth the hassle.

It would have been easier to get approval to upgrade the existing hardware compared to getting a complete new box.
 
Last time I looked at this SCSI passthrough was dropped from the product as a supported feature and had a VERY VERY limited scope for compatible hardware. The amount of chopping and hacking of various configs you had to do to achieve it was also sickening.

Just ended up with a dedicated backup server to do it over network from agents.
 
One other option I was toying with was to buy a new box with a reasonable, but not excessive, specification and transfer the SBS2003 instance (and the LTO) onto it. This would then free up the PE 2900 for more interesting things.

So ignoring the SBS2003/LTO issue are there any opinions on using a PE 2900 III as a virtualisation platform?

This particular machine is spec’d with:-

Single E5420 Xeon
4GB ram
PERC 6i
8 x 73GB 15K.4 SAS drives
2 years of remaining onsite warranty

It would obviously need significantly more ram, but taking it up to 20GB wouldn’t cost too much.

It would be running 3 VMs for the moment, two of which wouldn’t impose much load at all, and one which would be running some small but occasionally busy SQL Server DBs.

FWIW if SBS2003 was capable of using significantly more than 4GB of ram there wouldn’t be a problem in the first place.
 
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