VMware and TSM licensing question

rvillano

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PREDATAR Control23

To All,

I have a question regarding the licensing of tsm clients who are VM guests. Over the past year there has been great interest by customers in using VMware and TSM for protection of the vm guests data. there has been some significant improvements since TSM release 5.5 and onward regarding features and simplicity in the implimention of backup of these VM guests.

My question is this:

Using a vm guest or stand alone for the proxy of file level /full vm backups, It is not required to install a TSM ba client on the guests inorder to do backups of the quest vm's. the clients have to be defined and the proxy needs to be granted access. I realize that without a client ba install on the guest the recovery of files for the guest via the proxy is a bit complicated but can be done via a shared drive or other method ( thumb drive, sneaker net,etc) So how are these VM guests to be licensed? there is no client installed, no pvu's to calculate, just storage retained by the tsm server and referenced by the tsm database.

It would seem to me that the only licensing requirements are for the proxy itself? # of cores, PVU calc etc? I would really appreciated any thoughts or comments you might have regrading this.

Best Regards,
Bob
 
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PREDATAR Control23

As far as I know Tivoli still licenses systems by the number of cores/processors so whether or not you have a TSM client installed on/in the VM wont matter. So if you have 15 VM's on an 8 core system you pay the rate for 8 cores not for the 15 clients.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Hello Chad,
as I understand, in so called "VCB proxy" configuration, you install nothing on VMWare server itself, but you install TSM client on separate "proxy" server (I might be wrong, but I think it goes this way), which is usually far smaller than VMWare host.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Yeah but I think IBM will require you to license the servers that are being backed up whether or not they have the client installed....don't quote me on it, but that's how IBM operates in most cases.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Thank you Chad & Mita for your thoughts on this matter. With TSM b/a client 6.2 for windows at least... you can install the TSM client code on a vm guest and use it as a proxy node without the need for an external vcb proxy. on the other hand it might make better sense to use a physical server as the proxy due to resources of lan and disk, etc on the esx server providing the guest resources.

But the question still remains, on a physical vcb proxy server with say 4 cores then is that all that needs to be licensed? and for a tsm client installed on a vm with an allocation of say 4 cores to that guest, is that all that needs to be licensed if no tsm client code is installed on any of the guests needing backup?

If there are any members from IBM who monitor these adsm.org posts who whould like to explain this so all of us can understand the licensing better would be a great service to us in my opinion.

Bob...
 
PREDATAR Control23

I have the following in writing from my IBM sales guy:

If I have a VMware ESX server with virtual servers running on it and each virtual server has the TSM client loaded on it and is backing up to a TSM server, I only need to calculate the PVUs for the ESX server and that fully covers the TSM EE licenses needed for the existing virtual servers along with any additional virtual servers that may be created on that ESX server in the future.

-Mike
 
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VCB is almost dead. Shortly it will be a thing of the past. The way I understand it is you only license the VCB server as it is the only one with a client.

With 6.2 if you install even one baclient on a guest you have to license the host.
 
PREDATAR Control23

^ I really can't say. I will follow up with "Ask IBM" as I'm no expert.

Reading that document didn't change my opinion.

We have about 1400 tsm clients and about 60% of those are virtural servers. At this point we treat every VM client as a physical machine running only the normal incr backup via its own baclient.

We see no performance issues running 50 nodes on a blade each with their own software. This provides us individual file backup and restore at speeds of 30GB an hour via 1GB copper.

The beauty is accessing and recovering the client data is identical to physical machines thus standardizing documentation for operations. This approached combined with VMOTION provides excellent DR coverage. We see little or no perks to using VCB at this time.
 
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