This may be in part due to the demand for backup solutions for virtual environments. Over the past year I have been looking at solutions from TSM, EMC Avamar, NetBackup, and CommVault specifically for VMware backups. All of them have their pluses and minuses largely dependent on the size and architecture of the virtual environment. To be honest, I found TSM for Virtual Environments to be one of the more difficult ones to setup and manage, in part because of how our VMware environment was designed, but also in part due to the nature of the product. It feels like TSM was late to the game in the VM backup space and to some degree is playing catch up with the competition. There are other vendors pushing appliance based backup solutions that seem to be gaining popularity too.
We have a goal of moving 80%+ of our servers to virtual machines by the end of 2016. We had about 12,000 clients in TSM when I started this project, and I have moved 2,000 of them to Avamar in the past couple months. TSM will be relegated to backing up the ever shrinking AIX and Solaris clients until those applications are virtualized and moved to Linux or Windows.
-Rowl