VM Incremental Forever Backup for TSM?

[Spree]

On VM backup, I may not be too familiar with TSM and Veeam and some other backup software so I'm looking for some advice.

I am currently configuring a TSM server for internal use, one of the purposes is to take care of the VM farm.

To my limited knowledge Veeam should be able to consolidate backups automatically, but I am not sure about the case of TSM, for example:
Is it OK for me to take a forever incremental approach? I mean, if I can't keep the whole backup chain due to capacity problems, for example I only keep 3 versions of backups, when TSM purges old backups, is the backup chain still valid? If yes, does that mean TSM can consolidate backups automatically? Or if not, that means I still need a periodic full? Is there any article on how TSM and VMware forever incremental backups?

Please advise, thanks.

 

[marclant]

If you keep 3 versions, you can restore all 3 versions.

Every time you do an incremental backup (the first one is incremental too, it just happens to backup everything because nothing was previously backed up). Internally, Spectrum Protect keeps track of all the data blocks that are part of that version.

The next incremental backup, many of the data blocks in the first backup are not changed, so those are cataloged as also belonging to the 2nd backup, as well as the new data blocks that were changed since the last. And so-on for each subsequent backups.

When you add a 4th version, you lose the 1st one. However, the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th version included data blocks that were initially backed up by the first backup. Those are still kept because they are still needed by 2, 3, and 4.

There's no need for a consolidation process, things are tracked automatically as backups happen.

More info: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowled....ibm.itsm.ve.doc/c_ve_backup_incrforever.html