On Thursday 26 May 2005 16:05, TSM_User wrote:
> I have quite a few customers that are running VMWare and so far all of them
> have decided to just backup from within the virtual machine for the
> following reasons:
>
> 1)  Being that TSM is licensed per physical CPU there is no cost savings in
> using a single client license running on the ESX server to backup the .dsk
> files.
>
> 2) When you backup inside the VM you can either restore the data back onto
> a new VM or onto a real server if you like. Some of my customers run the VM
> at their site but have separate old servers at the hot site for recovery.
>
> 3) Most of the time VM's end up being smaller applications.  As a result
> there really isn't a huge need to improve the backup or restore time. I've
> been told that they can still run an image based backup from within the VM
> as well.  I haven't done this myself but if this is the case then you could
> still get a fast image backup and restore.
>
> 4) Who will officially support problems when you run into problems with
> backing up the VM Ware files and restores don't work.
>
>
> With those reasons above and the recent posts about issues with backup and
> recovery of the VM Files I'm wondering what reasons their are for backing
> up the .dsk files.  Still, I'm sure there are reasons out there.  I'd be
> interested in hearing from the people who are choosing to backup the .dsk
> files why they decided to go that route.
Simple, disaster recovery.  Restoring 1 big .dsk is much faster then restoring
the data in the image (and rebuilding the OS).

So we do both.  Backing up the .dsk for DR (we keep only 1 or 2 versions) that
contains the C drive.  We also backup the data within the virtual image with
more versions, most of the time it's another .dsk.  You can choose to not
backup the .dsk that contains only data to limit redundant backups.

Stef