If you are, you know who you are....

One of my customers uses VRanger to back up VM's, but still has a requirement 
to get the VRanger repository on tape for DR, for at least the next 3 years out 
(until we can get a hot DR site).  So they back up the VRanger repository to 
TSM, and of course, it's over half the TSM load each day, and almost half the 
total TSM data store.

The only nice thing about it, is that the VRanger respository is split into 
chunks belonging to each VM.  Customer rolls the VRanger versions off sooner 
than the TSM versions, so that they can go back further using TSM tape for a 
restore, than using the VRanger repository on disk.  And for the restore from 
tape, we only have to restore the particular VRanger files needed, not the 
whole respository.

VRanger in versions later than 5.3 now has the ability to dedup its backups by 
using a NetVaultSmartDisk repository.  All I have to go by is the manual, don't 
have any place I can test.  But it looks like switching to a deduped NVSD 
repository could make the backup-to-tape situation worse instead of better (of 
course, VRanger never designed for someone else to be backing up the 
repository).

Looks like the NVSD repository has a separate index, and the chunk store might 
be one big chunk that would require backing up the whole repository daily, and 
doing it cold (i.e., all VRanger activity shut down).  Can anybody confirm what 
is necessary to get an NVSD repository onto tape?   Anybody ever done a 
successful DR restore test for it?

Thanks for any insight - happy to RTFM if you can point me to one that would 
answer this particular question.
Wanda