Wanda,
Running your proxy on a tsm server would allow you to use sharedmemory instead
of network transfer, which theoretically should help. The question is whether
the 2 apps will play nice together, good luck getting either side to formally
approve the setup, although it sounds like a good idea.
As far as needing more than one proxy because of your weekly fulls, it depends
on the size of your vm's and your backup window.
We're currently running around 250 vm's through a single proxy (IBM HS21xm w/2
dual-core Xeon procs, 8gb mem, 4gb hba's, W2K3 x64). Nightly incremental
average around 4 hours. Weekend fulls are made up of multiple schedules (we
broke out the largest ones and scheduled later to avoid filling the vcb
storage). The main schedule holds 232 machines, ranging in size from
2.5gb-260gb (guess I need to go split that one out as well!) and runs approx 15
hours. The other machines range from 150-200gb each and run about 5-6 hours
each. And yes, this proxy is breathing hard the whole time, which is why I'm
getting ready to stand up 4 new proxies and distribute the load.
Btw, we're using the Storserver Agent, and have the concurrent backup set to
10, which seems about right for the size proxy we have.
Steve Schaub
Systems Engineer, Windows
BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Wanda Prather
Sent: Tuesday, September 29, 2009 11:07 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] VCB fullvm Proxy Server - opinions?
TSM server is 6.1.2 on Windows Win2K3.
I have a customer who has tested running VCB fullvm backups of VMWare
guests, using the TSM 6.1 client running on a Win2K3 Proxy server. No
problem getting the fullvm proxy backups to work.
They are planning to virtualize the entire server farm, so in the next 2
months they will grow to ~ 100 VM's.
They think they want to do VCB fullvm's of the guests once a week, on
Saturdays.
Now here's my opinion question:
We had no problem getting the proxy backups to work, but just based on the
number of VM's and ESX servers, I'm thinking I'll need more than 1 proxy
server, to provide lots of parallelism (so far, the bottleneck doing the
fullvms, is the COPY of the vmdk files to the proxy server disk);.
This TSM server has 2 quad-core processors; EMC Symmetrix disk, 16G Ram,
four 3592 tape drives - quite beefy for a Winders box.
We haven't come close to saturating physical resources, and esp. on
weekends, it really has not much to do.
I can't see why, since we have lots of unused hardware resources, I
shouldn't set it up as another proxy server. The fullvm copy to the proxy
disk gets compressed by VCB, so there isn't that much data generated per
hour to push to the TSM storage pools; the TSM server isn't going to be all
that busy when the fullvms run.
Anybody know a reason not to try it? I'm asking because the doc says you
MUST have a separate physical server for the proxy, but I can't see why it
would be a restriction, just an issue of resources.....
Thanks for any insight!
W
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