Virtualization: Ultrium LTO-5 3000 (SAS) + Guest OS Passthrough

[Trident911]

Afternoon all,

We have recently just purchased some new F&P Servers (HP Proliant) and upgraded our Tape Drives to the new LTO-5 Ultrium 3000's across a number of our offices. As we move forward with technology we wanted to move our F&P Servers over to a virtualized enviroment; Server 2008 R2 Core base, with our F&P and WSUS Servers virtualized within Hyper-V so as to decomisson two physical servers.

However, to my amazement, we have run into a brick-wall - and I can see I'm not alone from the last two days of research - in regards to Tape Drive passthroughs to Guest OSes. It is rumored that people have had success with VMWare and Citrix options, but nothing when it came to Microsoft Hyper-V. I went searching through a number of threads on here, but nothing has been posted recently, and hoping someone may have some insight for me in regards to allowing us to use Backup Exec on our F&P Server (Guest OS, W2K8 Full under Hyper-V)?

Regards,

Trident911