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chadwickking
Expert
Expert

Disaster Recovery - Very Important

Hello Community!

It has been sometime since I have been in the forums but was hoping that I could get some advice or recommendations for what we need to do to fix our DR plan as it is currently broken!!! 😞

I know the communites are strong in helping and hope to get some really good feedback. First off I want to say that I am very familiar with other backup solutions like Veeam, vRanger, TSM, and etc.

We currently use TSM widely and pretty much that is company standard.

I understand TSM 6.2 is the TSM client that supports VADP and have been reading on issues using that client - it seems widespread people are running into all sorts of odd things.

Veeam and VDR seem like our best options the only issue with Veeam is additional Capex on top of what we already use so ideally it could be option depending on how the others pan.

Now we also use datadomain and right now our environment is widely silo'ed.  We have 8 vCenters with clusters that are completely non-standard and to be frank its quite a mess.  Every cluster/client has there own personal NFS data domain to back up too.  This is a win because if anything can talk to that NFS share it will work.

Some things to note is that all clusters/hosts can talk to a TSM backup network so we could go down the road of using TSM directly on the host or on a VCB Proxy.  There advantages and disadvantages to this I know. Such us EOL VCB soon and ESX going away...

Here are some things for some thoughts:

Has anyone had experience with implementing TSM 5.5 > 6.2 in a vmware esx environment with 3 > 4.1 host.  (currently the customers required for this DR plan to be successful is only 3 so that helps with being able to meet the deadline)

Will I need to place a VDR in each cluster to perform the backup and are there anythings to look for that might be gotchas for mounting the NFS shares and setting up the appliance?. (I did this at the VMware FT course and it was fairly simple)

Is there a way to simply backup to the datadomain without a 3rd party solution through scripting or what not?

I am eager to hear replies and plan to log my journey on this new environment I now how ownership of.  Its going to be interesting.

Cheers, Chad King VCP4 Twitter: http://twitter.com/cwjking | virtualnoob.wordpress.com If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful
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2 Replies
albizrim
Contributor
Contributor

Hi

May be it is too late however, this is my experience with VMware and TSM,

You mention that TSM is the main backup system you have but your DR solution is the issue. Using TSM on one of the largest data storage and backup Datacentres in Europe, and at major Datacentres of many IT service providers, I found TSM satisfy all needs, especially TSM ver. 6.2.x.x onward. Involved in upgrading TSM from various older versions to current version seamlessly, including migrating from complicated storage wasting VCB for VM to the latest TSM CLIENT 6.2.3.X, this client support VStorage APIs, compatible with TSM servers 5.5 onward, meaning it can directly backup your VM

File

Image

Including block-level incremental tracking VMware Block Changes

Offloading the backup workload from virtual machines and production ESX hosts to VStorage providing recovery options:

File,

Volume

Image from single pass backup,

Near instant restore of Windows and Linux disk volume

Simplifying day to day file level administrations offering automated discovery of new VMs

Using Veeam was not convinced it is a superior product when it is compared with TSM flexibility and functions, special moving data around VMs disk etc…

Please let me know if you need further information or in depth technical solution to a specific issue you have

Regards

M. Al-Bizri

Senior Infrastructure and Storage architect

mark@mbteck.co.uk

Message was edited by: albizrim

chadwickking
Expert
Expert

Well, 1st off props to you for replying as no one is really much help inthe way of TSM and VMware.

Yes there are some blogs and what not but not a whole lot of information when you get down to the nitty gritty.

I agree with you on alot of your points but what I dont understand is why they have TDP for VMware and likewise the ability to do the same/similar backups with just the normal backup client.

We currently use client 6.2.3 and CBT doesnt ever seem to be working (Change Block Tracking.  After researching more and more I found that this could be becuase we dont have incremental backups set up.

We are using a VM proxy for Vstorage backups.  All host are 4.1 and vm machine hardware 7.  But we have all of our backup options files doing VMbackuptype = Fullbackup.

Do we need to change are option files to where it will run an incremental?  There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of information out there in the world of TSM and VMware.  This is a major downside as all VMware Peeps refer to google and the communities for support.

I have been searching ADSM.org on a routine basis but still they dont really go into details.

I know its possible to do this but just want to see someone providing the information of how they implemented it.

I would love to see us using this more in our environments but if we cannot get the information we need from IBM on how to BEST IMPLEMENT THIS - which when asking support couldn't give us ANY information - I find that very troubleng and makes us want to look at other options.  Esepcially ones that are more main stream.  Ofcourse we won't because of what we have invested it just frustrates me.

Cheers, Chad King VCP4 Twitter: http://twitter.com/cwjking | virtualnoob.wordpress.com If you find this or any other answer useful please consider awarding points by marking the answer correct or helpful
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