Moving VMs using tapes

[pieman]

Newbie here so please be kind :P

We want to move a number of VMs to another site and while we could just export them all to a portable HDD, we have TSM and a tape library so why not use that.

Now from within a VM I've learned how to point the TSM client to the ESX host, select a VM and back it up and restore it.

What would be the best way to set aside say x number of tapes in our library and backup to various VMs to those specific tapes so we can then simply insert them at the other site and restore the VMs?

[moon-buddy]

It depends on how many VMs to be moved. If this is just a few (around 100 or so), I would do this:

1. Create a new Domain et al and backup the VMs to this new Domain
2. Take a backup of the DB from the existing site and restore it to the remote site
3. Restore the VMs on the remote site

or:

1. Do an export of the VM (as node backup) to the existing site.
2. Restore the VM

If there is huge number of VMs to move, I would consider a different approach. I would consider replication of images from site A to site B; or a simple image transfer

[TykneeTym]

Moving tapes from one TSM server to another is almost always a pain. I would use the portable HDD over TSM in this case.