We're doing some testing of the self-contained application protection features 
of TSM for VE 7.1 and have come across a troubling problem that I would 
appreciate your thoughts on.

The application protection features are disabled if the VMware Tools on the 
guest are not 'current'. Fair enough if the Tools are years out-of-date, but 
the TSM client software seems to use a strange way to check. We have seen 
clients happily running application protection only to have it switched off 
because a newer version of the VMware tools have been made available to the 
client by an update to the ESX host. At least I'm assuming that's what happens 
based on the following message in the logs:
ANS9499W VMware tools on virtual machine 'XXXXXXXXXX' need to be updated. IBM 
Tivoli Storage Manager application protection will not be used.

Never mind that the guest continues to run the same version of the tools which 
were previously working without issue - if there is an even slightly newer 
version of the Tools available to the client then application protection will 
be disabled until the guest is updated.

Just think about that for a minute. You update your vSphere hosts to the latest 
patch levels with a view to updating the guests at your leisure and all of a 
sudden your guests no longer have application protection. You're exposed. Am I 
alone in thinking that disabling application protection in this scenario is a 
bug, or at the least a very poor design choice? I'm guessing most shops will 
have a lag between making the latest VMware Tools available and completing the 
update on all their guests?

Regards
Neil Schofield
Tivoli Storage Manager SME
Backup & Recovery | Storage & Middleware | Central Infrastructure Services | 
Infrastructure & Service Delivery | Group IT
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