VMWARE vmdk over 8 terabytes. VMMaxVirtualDisks=999 does not help.

[daviddeleeuw1]

HI TSM'ers

Our (research) environment uses large disks for VMWARE: over 8 TB each (gnomes, mri's etc.).
When these were "independent disks" we would just back up via the client file system.
We convert the disks to VMWARE VMDK's (no problem since vmware 6.5. Maximum = 62 TB).
We also started backing up via TDP for VE (which is far superior tot the traditional incr backup).
However the VMDK's over 8 TB can not be backed up this way.

ANS2236I The virtual machine 'XXXXX' contains one or more disks that exceed the
maximum size set by the VMMAXVIRTUALDISKS option. These disks will be excluded
from the backup.

Is this a problem of VMWARE, TSM or both ? Any solution in sight ?
Thanks,

David de Leeuw
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Beer Sheva
Israel

 

[RecoveryOne]

You mentioned that the disks are over 8tb each.
According to the latest 8.1.8 doc's here https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSEQVQ_8.1.8/client/r_opt_vmmaxvirtualdisks.html

size
    Specifies the maximum size, in terabytes (TB), of the VM disks to include in a backup operation. The range is an integer 2 - 8; the default is 2. The maximum is 8 TB (equivalent to 8192 GB).

Further down the page:

Back up VM disks that are 8 TB or smaller and exclude VM disks that are larger than 8 TB:

backup vm VM1 -vmmaxvirtualdisks=8 -vmskipmaxvirtualdisks=yes
Copy

Or:

backup vm VM1 -vmmaxvirtualdisks=999 -vmskipmaxvirtualdisks=yes

Seems like a possible limitation with IBM, but I would not rule out the fact that VMWare's vadp may have such a limitation as well. My suggestion would get a PMR open and see if there's any work around and/or find out exactly where the limitation is.

 

[RecoveryOne]

I do not know if Spectrum Protect Plus is affected by any size limitations, I have yet to deploy that product in my environment.
(Couldn't edit my above post so new post)