I am planning to connect a SAS tape drive to a VM in our ESXi 4 server (on certified hardware). I expected this to be trivial, but as I researched the proper way to do it, I found a lot of confusing info, including some who claim it doesn't work at all.
So what is the proper way to connect a SAS Tape drive (LTO 4) to a Guest on an ESXi host, given these facts:
VMDirectPath is not supported on the AMD processor model in use (because ESXi4 insists on IOMMU use)
Performance of the tape transfer is important and needs to be stable for production use
This is a tape drive, NOT a tape library
I am not asking about backup software, that is a separate issue
And these rumors (unconfirmed):
SCSI pass through to tape drives has problem
Finding Tape compatible SAS controllers (not Disk SAS controllers) on the HCL is amazingly difficult
Some people suggest getting an iSCSI to SAS converter and putting it on one of the 1Gb Ethernet ports, but I have seen no good suggestions for reasonably priced iSCSI to SAS converters