Anthony,
    What you say is just what EMC said, and that is that their
preference is that all their customers install the Avamar client
directly on each VM.  But this is not ideal to us for two reasons:
 
1) In the main environment I support, there are about 700 VMs and
growing.  That is a lot of Avamar clients to log in to and configure. 
The beauty of VCB is that it doesn't require a client install on each
machine; there is less administration per VM, which means less time.
 
2) With the VCB method, the VMware farm does not bear the burden of CPU
and I/O and memory consumption involved in performing the backups; that
is shifted to the proxy server.  Running the Avamar client backup on 700
separate VMs is going to create a burden on the VMware farm.  EMC will
hand-wave that away by saying that the Avamar client is very light, but
in our testing so far it is about even with, or perhaps slightly less
than the TSM clients.  EMC told us it is a tiny fraction of the
performance requirements of the TSM client, but we have not found that
to be the case.
 
Either way would work, I agree, but I think there are valid trade-offs
depending on the size of your environment, and the amount of backups you
do each day.

Best Regards,

John D. Schneider
The Computer Coaching Community, LLC
Office: (314) 635-5424
Toll Free: (866) 796-9226
Cell: (314) 750-8721


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [ADSM-L] TSM vs Avamar
From: leontom <tsm-forum AT BACKUPCENTRAL DOT COM>
Date: Wed, June 24, 2009 6:01 pm
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU

Hi,

If you could accept some additional information from an EMC insider...

Actually ,with Avamar, VCB is not really needed for the main backup
operations.

Indeed, the best is to install the files and applications agents
directly within the VMs.

In this way, you'll be able to make full daily snap-up of all your VMs
with a really minimal impact on your ESX plateform, thanks to the
source-based dedup.

VCB could, maybe, remains a commodity for full VM quick disaster
recovery.


Regards,
Anthony


[quote="John D. Schneider"]Hi!

5) Backing up VMs, because they are so similar to each other, sounds
like an idea application for deduplication. However, the VMWare VCB
proxy solution today is very bad. But in every Avamar presentation I
have been to, they completely gloss over how it really works. The way
it works today requires each separate VM to be in its own group and its
own schedule. In our case, with 600VMs, that was going to be a
nightmare. Sometime in the third quarter when VMWare comes out with its
next version of VCB, it is supposed to be much better.

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