HI Alan.

Most of my customers who are moving into VM for production systems
need/want "full" VM backups as well as TSM-type  file-level backups.
The "full" VM backup is an image backup of the .vmdk file containing the
VM guest.

The horror of running production apps on Windows is the dreaded DR
situation.
Since MS doesn't have a supported method for doing Bare-metal recovery
to different hardware, recovery of a Windows system to different
hardware at DR is a slow, multi-step process prone to complications.
However, if you have a copy of the .vmdk, you can drop it back onto an
ESX server at DR, in one step, and you DON"T have to deal with the move
to unlike hardware and the universe of issues dealing with Windows
system state.

And you can't get those .vmdk images with the TSM client.  While it is
possible to do file-by-file BMR for a VM guest, it's not something I'd
recommend if .vmdk images are available.

TSM file-level backups are still useful for versioning.  I have 2
customers using TSM (installed on the guest in the normal way) for the
VM file-level backups, and full VM's for DR.  

The problem with using VCB, is that doing those full VM's puts you back
into the business of dumping LOTS of data every week.  

I much prefer the use of VDR, which is VM's replacement tool for backups
in V4.  With VDR you get your fullvm's, but deduped into a disk
repository.  Then you back up the repository using TSM subfile backup.
Your first step then at DR, is to restore the repository from TSM tape.
Etc.   

If you need more info, feel free to contact me directly.

Wanda

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Allen S. Rout
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2010 11:14 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] ESXi and ESX

>> On Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:41:48 +0200, louw pretorius <louw AT SUN.AC DOT ZA>
said:

> 1. VCB is still officially the "right" way for backing up VM's from
> VMware's (and IBM's) perspective and TSM 6.2 has some nice
enhancements
> to get this done.


I'm aware that using VCB permits you to shift backup work from "the
real server" to some proxy.  Is there any other reason to prefer VCB
to simply managing your guests like any other machine?


- Allen S. Rout