TSM Licenses?

[Snr_Whippy]

Does anyone know how TSM client licenses work on a guest VM?

[weinstein5]

From what I understand works exactly like it does on physical machines -

[stm_cro]

You can purchase a licence for the physical host (TSM extended edition on a 4 CPU-quad core=16 cores) and then install any number of TSM client in your VM.

I still don't know what if you use VCB: do you need only to licence the VCB server? For any number of VM host?

I should have the answer tomorrow!

[Snr_Whippy]

So If i have 3 x ESX Hosts 2 x 3GHZ Quad Xeons

Thats:

8 Cores per ESX host

24 Cores for the 3 Hosts (Infrastructure)

This would then enable me to use TSM on every virtual machine for file level backup much like in the physical environment.

Then i assume VCB it makes sense to put this on a single core machine as you only need to license the VCB for the windows proxy it is sitting on.

25 cores then to backup my infrastructure.

VCB doesnt really need anything too powerful i would expect, correct me if im wrong.

[stm_cro]

I just talked with IBM sales and here's what I undestood:

VCB: you HAVE to licence both the VCB server (proxy server) and ESX server

VM on ESX: you HAVE to licence the server. Even if you you want to backup one VM, you need the licence for the underlying hardware....

They use Value Unit for licence:

One core = 50 vu -> for your 3 esx it would be 324=24 cores

For old CPU's with one core= 1 CPU= 100 vu -> for your VCB server, 1 way dual-core licence is cheaper than 2 way single core....

I've never used VCB, so I don't know what kind of ressource you need.

But I would guess, you will use lot of I/O: from SAN/iscsi to read data + write to LAN/TSM server

And probebly the overhead to read through virtual disk driver. So 2 core for VCB server might be usefull...

[Snr_Whippy]

Yep TSM is licensed by the number of CPU's, cores and speed of the processors in the Host's. So you can pack as many VM's as you can in there for the same price.

It also looks like if you run VCB you only need to buy one license for the server VCB is running on and you can run file/image level backups.

Mind you if you want to restore you still can but if you dont use the agent for file level restores it can mess up the NTFS partitions.

Please argue with me if you think this is incorrect.

[holografique]

that's not correct.

if you use VCB, you have to license the cores on the VCB server AND the cores on the ESX host servers, regardless of how many VM's the hosts are running.

So if you have 1 VCB server with 2 cores, and 4 ESX hosts with 4 cores each (dual dual core CPUs) that's a total of 18 cores = 18 TSM CPU licenses

In comparison to products like vRanger or Veeam. they don't require you to license the VCB proxy server, and they don't count cores, they just count physical sockets.

-o