About the Tape Library Simulator Utility
The Tape Library Simulator Utility lets you create a virtual device on a hard disk or on any mounted volume on a Linux server. This virtual device emulates a SCSI tape library. The Remote Media Agent for Linux must be installed on the server.
When you run the Tape Library Simulator Utility, you are prompted for the following information:
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The number of slots that you want to allocate to this library.
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The location or path for the library.
The Tape Library Simulator Utility then creates the media for the simulated tape library. To ensure that each media has a unique name, the Tape Library Simulator Utility creates a bar code label for each media. You cannot rename these bar code labels. However, you can add a unique media description.
The simulated tape library emulates an Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT) media type. This media type is seldom used, so it helps you distinguish between a physical robotic library and a simulated tape library. The simulated media also has an AIT media type label.
The format of the files that are written to the simulated tape library is similar to the file format of backup-to-disk files. However, you cannot copy or move files between simulated tape libraries and disk-based storage.
You can add the simulated tape library to Backup Exec storage device pools.
To use the Tape Library Simulator Utility, you must have a minimum of 500 MB of available space on the Linux server. The available space includes hard disk space, flash drives, and USB drives. If there is not enough space, the jobs fail with an end-of-media error. You must either create available disk space or you must direct the jobs to another volume, and then start the jobs again.
A simulated tape library does not support all of the tasks that are available for physical robotic libraries.
Note: You cannot run fast cataloging of the tapes that have become inseparable. Backup Exec automatically reverts to slow cataloging. The following message is written in the catalog job's job log: "An error was encountered while attempting to read the Media Based Catalog's Set Map data. Attempting to catalog the media by reading the data area of each backup set." This problem occurs because an incomplete on-tape catalog is written to the tape at the end of a backup job. As a result, subsequent backup jobs cannot find the tape's set map, and flag the tape as unreadable.
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