I have quite a few customers that are running VMWare and so far all of them 
have decided to just backup from within the virtual machine for the following 
reasons:

1)  Being that TSM is licensed per physical CPU there is no cost savings in 
using a single client license running on the ESX server to backup the .dsk 
files.

2) When you backup inside the VM you can either restore the data back onto a 
new VM or onto a real server if you like. Some of my customers run the VM at 
their site but have separate old servers at the hot site for recovery.

3) Most of the time VM's end up being smaller applications.  As a result there 
really isn't a huge need to improve the backup or restore time. I've been told 
that they can still run an image based backup from within the VM as well.  I 
haven't done this myself but if this is the case then you could still get a 
fast image backup and restore.

4) Who will officially support problems when you run into problems with backing 
up the VM Ware files and restores don't work.


With those reasons above and the recent posts about issues with backup and 
recovery of the VM Files I'm wondering what reasons their are for backing up 
the .dsk files.  Still, I'm sure there are reasons out there.  I'd be 
interested in hearing from the people who are choosing to backup the .dsk files 
why they decided to go that route.



                
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