Issues with TSM 6.2.2 Client and vmWare vStorage API Backups

We're delighted to see that IBM has expanded vmWare support significantly with 
the 6.2.2 release by redesigning the TSM client to use the vmWare vStorage API 
for full image backups directly to TSM (without using legacy VCB support). We 
have installed the TSM 6.2.2 release for Windows (and selected custom install 
to install the vmWare components) on a virtual machine designed as a backup 
proxy within our vmWare vSphere 4.1 environment. The backup proxy is a Windows 
Server 2008 R2 64-bit guest configured as required in the TSM 6.2.2 
documentation. Our initial testing with 6.2.2 has revealed that TSM is capable 
of backing some simple virtual machines but with other "more-complicated" 
virtual machines the TSM client typically crashes while attempting to backup an 
image of the machine.

We have narrowed the issue down to the networking configuration within vSphere. 
We have four (4) clusters defined in vSphere 4.1 and on every cluster except 
for our testing cluster we have created virtual switch and port groups to 
manage the network traffic on the hosts and virtual machines. The testing 
cluster has the simple vmWare supplied default network configuration with only 
a single "VM Network" connection available to virtual machines. All virtual 
machines in this cluster can be backed up with TSM 6.2.2 without issue. However 
on our other clusters most of the virtual machine backups crash the TSM client. 
Though extensive troubleshooting we found that we can simply delete the virtual 
network card from the virtual machine and TSM backs up the virtual machine 
perfectly so we know that TSM is crashing because of something related to the 
network configuration on the guest. However as you can appreciate removing the 
virtual NIC card isn't an acceptable solution for our prod
 
 uction systems. We've also been able to confirm that we can take a virtual 
machine that crashes TSM and move it to the testing cluster (with the simple 
"VM Network" connection configuration) and the virtual machine backs up without 
issue.

We are interested to hear what others may be experiencing with the new vStorage 
API full image backups in TSM 6.2.2. Are there any other TSM customers that are 
experiencing issues with the TSM client crashing while attempting to backup 
virtual machines?

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