Keith,
A few thoughts....
Putting a TSM server on a VM may have advantages in performing a quick
recovery of the TSM server in the event of a corrupted DB or other nasty
event. Not sure how DB2 would integrate with VM snapshots but it sounds
interesting.
If you are backing up VMs or data located on the same VM host as the TSM
server VM, are you really protected or just practicing backups with no
real intention of performing a restore when there is a serious problem?
Throughput will probably be your biggest obstacle and may consume most
of the resources on the VM host.
Have you considered several TSM instances on a non-VM server with the
same beefiness as your proposed VM host? It sounds like someone is
trying to get you to save a nickle or two and squeeze a few CPU cycles
out of a TSM server to share with an application server. If you put the
TSM server on a VM host that also has a largish DB and depend on
production timing to share resources, you may run into a resource
conflict when either environment runs slightly out of it's 'normal'
production window causing a death spiral for both environments.
Cheers,
Neil Strand
Storage Engineer - Legg Mason
Baltimore, MD.
(410) 580-7491
Whatever you can do or believe you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic.
-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
Keith Arbogast
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2011 2:01 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] copypool-only TSM server on a VM
I have been asked to evaluate the use of copypool-only TSM servers built
on virtual machines.
Virtual machines on ESX can't do I/O to tape devices, but the source
server for a server-to-server copy pool does not need to do I/O to tape
devices. It sends its files to the target TSM server which does the tape
I/O. So, potentially, several TSM servers built on virtual machines
could send virtual volumes to one physical TSM server target with tape
I/O capability. Primary pools would be defined on the source servers,
but they would be marked unavailable permanently.
Each TSM server on a virtual machine would have two copy pools: one
on-site and the other off-site; instead of an on-site primary pool and
an off-site copy pool.
The reason for doing this would be; to divide the backup load into
smaller chunks across more TSM servers, to avoid buying more physical
servers, and to share tape drives without using a Library Manager.
A detriment of this setup would be that reclamation of the copypools
would be degraded with no primary tape pools to read from.
Are there other obvious or subtle problems with this idea? Or, is it
brilliant?...
Which copypool would restore files come from? How would that be managed?
Our TSM license is based on TB in primary storage, so extra licenses are
not a factor.
Please, don't be shy.
Thank you,
Keith Arbogast
Indiana University
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