Hanging a Tape drive on a Domain Controller?

[dhscott]

Hi,

We are currently running BackupExec 9.0 on a W2k server with a Seagate LTO Ultrium Viper 200 LVD tape drive. Unfortunately we are now running out of room and need to add a second tape drive, same as above. My question is, does anyone know any reasons not to hang the tape drive from our domain controller? Are there any negatives to this? Is it better or worse off hanging from our Exchange server? Why?
Any comments would be helpful.
Thank you

Scott

 

[Davetoo]

The only issue I would be worried about is if you have to update the backup software, you'll most likely have to reboot your DC.

I'm working to remove all extras from our DC's and put them on their own server(s) so that when I have to do maintenance it won't effect the domain and I can do it at my leisure.

I'm Certifiable, not certified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

 

[dholbrook]

My $0.02 worth!

I do not recommend putting the tape backup on the DC or an Exchange server, as it will load down either system and it is not necessary to run it on a DC.

My recommendation is to build a backup server with several 100GBs of drive space. MAchines for this do not have to be expensive beasts, just huge drive resources.

(Note: it does not have to be a server either, and could use some nice cheap IDE drives! Add an additional controller and throw several 200+ GB drives into it.)

That way you can have every server run its own backup at night using the native backup utility (batch files work great by the way!) and save the backup onto the backup server. You can even make a drive area for each machine. This way, you can run your tape backups during the day when you can watch them, and will not load down any of the operational systems. It also gives you a current backup, including system state for every system, readily available at all times. One very good additional benifit of this is when a tape sticks, you do not have to reboot a DC or other server.

HTH

David