Anyone Using VMWare vStorage with TSM?

GregE

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PREDATAR Control23

VMWare is ending VCB availabilty. I'm wondering if anyone is using vStorage and/or if IBM yet has ties into this with any TSM client version? I hope the 5.5.x codestream will, and not force a move to 6.x for this capability. The word "vStorage" doesn't appear in 5.5 or 6.1 Windows BA client guides.
http://www.vmware.com/products/vstorage-apis-for-data-protection/features.html

Got this email from VMWare today.....

Dear Valued Customer,

The purpose of this letter is to inform you of our vSphere backup product strategy, ongoing enhancements, and end of availability plans for VMware Consolidated Backup.

VMware Backup Product Strategy
VMware released vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) with the vSphere 4.0 release in May, 2009. VADP is the next generation of VMware’s backup framework. We have also been working with several backup partners to integrate VADP into their solutions to make backup of vSphere Virtual Machines fast, efficient and easy to deploy compared to VCB and other backup solutions. Several of our major backup partners have already released VADP integrated backup products and we expect most of the major backup partners to have VADP integrated backup software by the upcoming feature release of the vSphere platform in 2010.

Future Product Licensing
Given the strong interest and adoption of VADP by our backup eco-system and the benefits offered by VADP compared to VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB), we are announcing the End of Availability for VCB starting with next vSphere feature release in 2010. Starting with the next vSphere platform feature release, VCB will be removed from vSphere platform. VADP integrated backup products (including VMware Data Recovery) will be the recommended option for efficient backup and restoration of vSphere Virtual Machines. This will allow us to focus new value added feature development on VADP instead of two backup frameworks (VCB and VADP). You can find more information about the use of vStorage APIs for Data Protection in our Developer Community. For information on the availability of VADP integrated release of your backup product please contact your backup vendor.

End of Availability
With the release of the next vSphere platform, we will continue to provide the binaries for VCB, but they will not be compatible with the next platform release. We will continue to provide support for VCB on the current vSphere platform per the VMware support policy.
 
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PREDATAR Control23

Thanks for the post! We continue to treat vm's as physicals and each get their own agent. From what I can tell there is no downside to this approach as it standardizes our backup and recovery approach and documentation.

I wonder what this will bring to the table.
 
PREDATAR Control23

vStorage support in TSM 6.2

I'm just getting ready to leave this year's Pulse, Tivoli's annual conference. I attended a session with IBM's Dave Cannon (TSM Architect) who went over the TSM 6.2 announcement. TSM 6.2 begins supporting the vStorage API. http://bit.ly/97b0S4

BTW, if you haven't been to Pulse you need to plan for next year. http://www.ibm.com/pulse
 
PREDATAR Control23

Thanks, this is good information. So, there will be no support for vStorage wrapped into 5.5.x at all?

We don't use VCB, but have a server setup that is designated to be VCB at some point. BUT,when I saw the VCB announcement, that changes the game. At the same time, moving to 6.2 is quite an endeavor and a big change that we'd not likely make very soon, so a TSM 5.5 tie to vStorage would be pretty big. Seem like otherwise we're in limbo.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Just talked with my IBM rep, 6.2 goes GA tomorrow and doco should be avaialble then. It will utilize the vStorage API's for FLB.
 
PREDATAR Control23

I read elsewhere that it only requires the 6.2 client and not version 6 server.

I'm looking at this today because one of my accounts wants to use NetBackup to do this and I don't want to support NetBackup if I don't have to (the rest of our environement is all TSM).
 
PREDATAR Control23

In general v6.2 clients will work v5.5 and later

The v6.2 client will work with v5.5 for the VMware functions.
 
PREDATAR Control23

vstorage is only supported for vm file level backup. for vm full backups you need to play with vcb

i really don't understand what IBM are thinking !!
VCB is not a good solution
 
PREDATAR Control23

The v6.2 client will work with v5.5 for the VMware functions.

Yup KB that is correct, but 6.2 server is required to utilize some features such as Client-side dedup, auto client deployment to existing TSM clients, simultaneous writes to active and copy pools, and in flight data encryption.
 
PREDATAR Control23

How to size the hardware for the proxy server?

Thanks mmaliakas!

How to size the configurations of backup proxy? How many virtual machine can be backed up by one proxy server? Or how much data can be managed by one proxy server? :confused:

For example, a normal proxy server configurations are 1 x Quad-Core Xeon, 4GB RAM, 200GB internal HDD on our x3850 server. I have 10TB data require file-level backup.

For a small implementation such as 4TB data, can I just install the client on a Windows TSM server? :rolleyes:

Compare VCB and VADP


 
PREDATAR Control23

You can use many proxy nodes from the same machine. You only have to configure others opt files.

with this you can backup simultaneously many vms from the same server with only restriction the size of the staging area that vcb use
 
PREDATAR Control23

Does anyone know which upcoming backup client patch for 6.2 (I hope we don't have to wait for 6.3) will support vStorage API full VM image backup, since right now 6.2 only supports file-level, requiring VCB for VM image? With VCB going away, I assume IBM is working on this. Any word?
 
PREDATAR Control23

i really don't know. VCB will be very soon out of support from VMWare. I don't know what IBM is thinking !!

TSM 6.2 Client should support Vstorage for Full VM Backup. They have implement it for VM File Level so whats the problem?

:confused: :down:
 
PREDATAR Control23

6.2 still uses VCB for the image, and the API for file-level backups.
In conversation with my rep. he claimed that they are currently in the process of moving the full/image backup to the vStorage API and should be ready "sometime" in the second half of this year.
I should get more info next month and will try to provide details when I do.
 
PREDATAR Control23

How you size the vsphere backup proxy will depend on a lot of things, but mostly whether or not you intend to do full vm backups. Assuming you'll only do file-level backups, then it has the potential to handle a lot of guest machine backups. The biggest drawback is that there is no parallel processing: guests are backed up one at a time. This isn't necessarily that big of an issue with TSM's progressive incrementals, but you still have to worry about full backups depending on often new guest machines are brought online. (I got around the strict sequential backups by setting up multiple host names/scheduler services on the same vcentre -- t'ain't pretty though!)

Putting the vsphere/vcb framework on the tsm server would eleminate network traffic completely as you would have a SAN connection to the vm SAN disk and use shared memory (named pipes) to transfer the data to the TSM server. I would definitely avoid using data deduplication in this scenario! You won't need much in terms of CPU power (still, I'd go with a quad-core at least), but it would have to push a hell of a lot of data. Give the server lots of memory and make sure all peripheral busses are independent and high speed. You'll need an HBA pair for the vmware disk, a pair for the disk storage pool, and a pair for the database/recover logs. If you're using high-speed tape like LTO4/5, then the fan-out ratio for these should be 1:1.

Like I said, you'll have to push a HELL of a lot of data.

Good luck!

As I remember, the storage agent wasn't supported on a vsphere proxy -- has this changed with 6.2? I don't recall reading anything about that.
 
PREDATAR Control23

DanGiles you are correct but don't forget that FileLevel Backup are only for Windows.

So for all the rest we need to take vcb backups or having the agent install in each vm

i really don't like the approach of IBM in VMware environments.
Unfortunately NetBackup this time is far better in this section
 
PREDATAR Control23

The file level backups being only for Windoze was a VCB restriction; the vstorage allows file level backups for linux clients as well.

I don't know NetBackup's capabilities in a vmware environment.
 
PREDATAR Control23

no its a TSM restriction. Filelevel backups are with Vstorage and only for Windows

and for FullVM we use VCB

VCB will be very soon out of support from VMWare
 
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