Our biggest driver was DR.
Getting some of our app and AD servers restored & running on dissimilar
hardware was getting too complicated & unreliable.
We weren't keeping many versions of files on these servers anyway, so
keeping versions of the .vmdk files is not that big of a deal to us.
Loading ESX & restoring vm's is easier for us to manage at the hotsite than
multiple physicals.
Now if I could only get it to work consistantly.....

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
TSM_User
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 10:05 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] Backing up VMWare from Guest -vs- backing up .dsk files

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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