A Virtual Tape Emulation (VTE) application is able to be updated without disrupting IO operations by hosts on a set of virtual tape drives managed by the VTE application. When an old VTE application is to be replaced with a new VTE application, the new VTE application is provided with the same configuration information as the old VTE application. Each time a host unmounts a virtual tape from a virtual tape drive on the old VTE application, device management for that virtual tape drive is migrated from the old VTE application to the new VTE application. Specifically, path and channel information for the virtual tape drive is transferred to the new VTE application, and applied by the new VTE application to a respective device on the new VTE application. Once device management for all virtual tape drives has been transferred, the old VTE application is terminated.