SAS Tape Drive (LTO5) Passthrough to VM on BHYVE?

[Matt Mabis]

Hello,

I was wondering if its possible to use a SAS based LTO Tape Drive and pass it through to a underlying VM created on the FreeNAS Box so the VM could have direct IO access to the tape drive to write backups? I have seen a lot of articles that talk about setting up Jails to do this with native FreeNAS but not many pieces of data to talk about can i pass-through the device to a VM..

Ideally what i would like to do

• SAS-3008 Controller that has access to Drives within ZFS array and Tape Drive and only pass-through the tape drive. (keep in mind the SATA/SAS drives and SAS Tape Drive all run at 6Gb/s so there shouldn't be saturation of the 12Gb Card.)
• Underlying VM would be running Windows OS to do LTFS based Backups on datastores local to the NA

This is meant for extreme longevity Backups of essential data that is why i am using Tape (LTO5) to do the work.

Any help would be appreciated

 

[kdragon75]

Jails are still part of FreeNAS. Nothing gets passed through to them it's just un-hiddden.
VM are a full separate OS running on virtualized and emulated hardware. To truly passthrough the tape drive for direct IO, you need to passthrough the entire LSI card. You may still be able to pass just the drive as a scsi device but I can't seem to find the official docs.

 

[Arwen]

I don't have an answer in regards to passing a tape drive through...
But I do have another suggestion, M-Disc. They are available in DVD and Bluray sizes, and are expected to last 100s of years;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-DISC

That said, obviously they are much smaller than LTO5 tape. However, they can be read on any appropriate optical drive. Meaning if you used a 25GB or 50GB M-Disc, you would need a Bluray drive. For the 100GB M-Disc, you need a Bluray drive that supports BD-XL.

I like the idea that I don't have to support a tape drive for long term archival data. That has always been an issue with corporate financial data, how to read those 15 year old tapes today. We are likely going to have long term support for optical discs, even after movies, series and music drop support for them.

Note: Most, if not all Bluray writer drives can write Bluray M-Discs. That is not the case of DVD writer drives... they have to have special support for DVD M-Discs.