Re: XEN 4.12, redirect tape drive to domu

[Niels Dettenbach <nd@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Am Freitag, 25. September 2020, 15:20:53 CEST schrieb Éliás Tamás:
> My question is, should it be possible to passthrough this tape drive, or
> the complete scsi card sitting on the pci (due to it's only aim is to
> provide access to the tape), somehow? Are there any specialities?
hmm,
if just one DomU should gain access to that PCI device, PCI passthrough may 
work, but if you want to use it from different DomU things may get 
complicated, because only one DomU at a time should get access to it. If xen 
allows to attach tape scsci devices (never tried it) this may be a way to 
instead.

If you want to use it i.e., for a daily/nightly backup of all DomU, PCI 
hotplug and PCI attach (or storage device attach/detach iif it works with 
tape) may be way to "connect" -> backup -> "disconnect" to the volumes of 
each DomU.

I wrote a xenbackup tool (shell scripts) for Dom0 side backup of LVM based 
DomU storages (with snapshots) - by default for backup-manager, but it may be 
a base to adapt it to your "batch" application with PCI passthrough and some 
ssh command to do the backup "from within" the DomUs if you need that.

https://www.syndicat.com/open_source/projekte/xenbackup/
https://github.com/nielsd/xen-host-allbackup

you would have to adapt the snaps_backup_mount / snaps_backup_umount scripts

DomUs/storages could be configured in:
/etc/xenback_vols



hth,


niels.
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 Niels Dettenbach
 Syndicat IT & Internet
 http://www.syndicat.com
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