Virtual TapeServer 8.4 Configuration Guide

2 | Virtual TapeServer Configuration Guide
For every host connection to VTS, the host system “sees” one or more tape drives; the virtual tape
drive emulates the type of tape drive specified during the initial installation and setup process.
Virtual tape drives behave just like real tape drives without the problems generally associated with
real tape drives.
VTS delivers reliable, scalable, and high performance virtual tape for backup, restore, Transaction
Management Facility (TMF), archive, and data recovery operations. You can deploy VTS to simplify
and streamline traditional tape operations, reduce costs for storage hardware and tape media,
automate backup and restore operations, and increase flexibility in managing backed-up data.
The virtual environment
The basic building blocks of VTS are vaults, pools, virtual tape drives, and virtual tapes. VTS can
support multiple virtual tape drives that respond to tape commands just as a physical tape drive
would.
Virtual pools are organized into vaults, which correspond to areas of the file system that are
configured according to user needs. Defining several vaults is a convenient way to separate data for
different applications or users.
Note Vaults are used for storing pools only; VTS uses vaults for virtual tapes and VTD components
exclusively. Files and applications should be installed in other storage locations, such as the
root partition.
Virtual tapes are “stored” in pools, which are the equivalent to magazines of cartridges used in tape
drive libraries. A pool can contain as many virtual tapes as necessary for a given application, which
provides a great advantage over cartridge magazines that have physical limits to the number of
cartridges they can contain. A pool is synonymous with a directory on a file system.