Help me understand vSphere + TSM

[micha]

Hi,

we are currently backing up our VMs through VCBProxy. That means we have a dedicated Hardware with Windows, VCBProxy and a TSM Client which mounts the VMs and backups them.

Now the use of VCBProxy is deprecated and one should use the vSphere API instead, but I don't have a clue how this can be done.

Where Do I have to install the TSM Client - on every single VM? How and where to I start the backup, what piece of software is mounting the vm?

Please help me to understand this.

Thanks,
Micha

 

[micha]

I really need some help here

Where has the agent to be installed? How is he accessing the Files/VDisks?

Thanks,
Michael

 

[Mita201]

I am also trying to find any info about concepts, best practices, etc. Unfortunately, I am unable to find it at IBM site. I just can find (on VMWare website) that it is supported with TSM 6.2 client.
Any help would be appreciated....

 

[TykneeTym]

TSM doesn't support VADP yet as far as I know.

Client on every VM or I think you can continue using VCB it's just not supported.

 

[Mita201]

Well, from today (TSM BA client 6.2.2 can be found at IBM ftp) it should work - VMWare image backup through proxy using vStorage API.
Unfortunatelly, no clear documentation on it.
As far as I get to there, you should install TSM BA client on host that will be used for proxy-ing, with VMware option selected in custom setup, and that host should have some of vSphere client components installed - do not know what exactly.
Looking into help that comes with BA client, it looks like there is no GUI components that you can utilise - you have to do backups and restores using TSM command line client.
If anybody have any experience, or good documentation, it would be nice to share here.

 

[wpinegar]

We've recently implemented the TSM 6.2.2 client and configured it to use the new VADP support (vStorage API for Data Protection). I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have about the TSM 6.2.2 client and vSphere machine backups. I would agree that the documentation is sparse. We did discover that there are bugs in the TSM 6.2.2 client that cause the client to crash when attempting a full backup of some virtual machine configurations. So your mileage may vary.

We're not performing file-level backups of virtual machines using VADP. Currently we have focused on full image backups. Anyway for what it's worth here is how we choose to implement our full virtual machine backup strategy using TSM 6.2.2 and the vStorage API:

We decided to install the TSM 6.2.2 client on a virtual machine that is designated as the "TSM backup proxy". When you install the TSM client you will need to choose the "custom install" and install the vmWare Backup components. This will install the required VADP libraries. The advantage of running the proxy as a virtual machine is that there is no separate physical box necessary and TSM is capable of "hot-adding" virtual disks as necessary to the proxy in order to perform the most efficient backups. For example, if the vSphere host can access the LUN that contains virtual machines you are backing up then the proxy will be able to as well and will mount the virtual disks directly when backing them up; if the vSphere host cannot access the LUN then TSM/VADP will fall-back to a LAN-based backup of the requested virtual machine. It works very well. Choosing this approach meant that we no longer had to manage a separate proxy server with access to the SAN and configure it with the ability to access all of the LUN's in vSphere.

Because we have a large vmWare environment we opted to only perform a full backup of a portion of our virtual machines each night and rotate through all of the machines nightly until we had an image backup of every virtual machine. We choose to limit the TSM backup to approximately 500GB of virtual machine images nightly and designed a Powershell script to work through a list of all virtual machines to make sure that we had a full image backup of all machines. We decided to make the entire process database driven. Once each day the backup process starts and updates the current list of virtual machines in our environment -- which adds new machines, deactivates machines that have been removed and updates the total GB consumed by each VM. Next it performs a TSM VADP image backup of no more than 500GB of virtual machines images then it waits until the next backup window to backup the next set of machines. In all it takes about 12 days for us to cycle through all of the virtual machines using a single proxy node to backup 3 of our vSphere clusters. We may add additional proxy machines in the future as necessary. Overall we are pleased with the process.

We discovered several bugs that prevent us from backing up a number of virtual machines so we revert to VCB backups for 41% of our virtual machines. VCB is less efficient than TADP. TSM unfortunately fails to backup some machines using the vStorage API and crashes (dumps with an unhandled exception) while attempting to backup particular machines. We decided to use the same virtual machine for both VADP and VCB backup methods. We allocated a large virtual disk to the proxy to allow sufficient storage for the transient backup images that are created by the VCB backup method. Again all of this is database driven using Powershell so the TSM backup proxy knows which machines can be backed up successfully with each backup method. In order to add VCB support we had to install the VCB components on the backup proxy.

At the moment we are still installing the TSM client on vSphere guests for our file-level backups but this may change in the future.

Let me know if you have any additional questions and keep us posted on your own experience with TSM and vSphere.