ADSM-L

[ADSM-L] VCB fullvm Proxy Server - opinions?

2009-09-29 23:07:57
Subject: [ADSM-L] VCB fullvm Proxy Server - opinions?
From: Wanda Prather <wprather AT JASI DOT COM>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 23:06:42 -0400
TSM server is 6.1.2 on Windows Win2K3.
I have a customer who has tested running VCB fullvm backups of VMWare
guests, using the TSM 6.1 client running on a Win2K3 Proxy server.  No
problem getting the fullvm proxy backups to work.

They are planning to virtualize the entire server farm, so in the next 2
months they will grow to ~ 100 VM's.
They think they want to do VCB fullvm's of the guests once a week, on
Saturdays.

Now here's my opinion question:

We had no problem getting the proxy backups to work, but just based on the
number of VM's and ESX servers, I'm thinking I'll need more than 1 proxy
server, to provide lots of parallelism (so far, the bottleneck doing the
fullvms, is the COPY of the vmdk files to the proxy server disk);.

This TSM server has 2 quad-core processors; EMC Symmetrix disk, 16G Ram,
four 3592 tape drives - quite beefy for a Winders box.
We haven't come close to saturating physical resources, and esp. on
weekends, it really has not much to do.

I can't see why, since we have lots of unused hardware resources, I
shouldn't set it up as another proxy server.   The fullvm copy to the proxy
disk gets compressed by VCB, so there isn't that much data generated per
hour to push to the TSM storage pools; the TSM server isn't going to be all
that busy when the fullvms run.

Anybody know a reason not to try it?  I'm asking because the doc says you
MUST have a separate physical server for the proxy, but I can't see why it
would be a restriction, just an issue of resources.....

Thanks for any insight!
W

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