HI Alan. Most of my customers who are moving into VM for production systems need/want "full" VM backups as well as TSM-type file-level backups. The "full" VM backup is an image backup of the .vmdk file containing the VM guest.
The horror of running production apps on Windows is the dreaded DR situation. Since MS doesn't have a supported method for doing Bare-metal recovery to different hardware, recovery of a Windows system to different hardware at DR is a slow, multi-step process prone to complications. However, if you have a copy of the .vmdk, you can drop it back onto an ESX server at DR, in one step, and you DON"T have to deal with the move to unlike hardware and the universe of issues dealing with Windows system state. And you can't get those .vmdk images with the TSM client. While it is possible to do file-by-file BMR for a VM guest, it's not something I'd recommend if .vmdk images are available. TSM file-level backups are still useful for versioning. I have 2 customers using TSM (installed on the guest in the normal way) for the VM file-level backups, and full VM's for DR. The problem with using VCB, is that doing those full VM's puts you back into the business of dumping LOTS of data every week. I much prefer the use of VDR, which is VM's replacement tool for backups in V4. With VDR you get your fullvm's, but deduped into a disk repository. Then you back up the repository using TSM subfile backup. Your first step then at DR, is to restore the repository from TSM tape. Etc. If you need more info, feel free to contact me directly. Wanda -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ads...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of Allen S. Rout Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:14 AM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] ESXi and ESX >> On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:41:48 +0200, louw pretorius <l...@sun.ac.za> said: > 1. VCB is still officially the "right" way for backing up VM's from > VMware's (and IBM's) perspective and TSM 6.2 has some nice enhancements > to get this done. I'm aware that using VCB permits you to shift backup work from "the real server" to some proxy. Is there any other reason to prefer VCB to simply managing your guests like any other machine? - Allen S. Rout
