On 7 dec. 2011, at 20:35, Jim Neal wrote:

> Hi All,
> 
> 
> 
>                I am trying to find Official IBM documentation that
> explicitly answers the following questions:
> 
> 
> 
> 1)      How many TSM instances can be run per Linux Blade?   ( I have been
> told that there is a limit of one instance per Blade, but I don't see this
> anywhere in the TSM 6.2 Server documentation)

you'll probably run into memory issues eventually. There are no hard technical 
limitations that I know of, apart from TCP limits that you can have a maximum 
of 64510 processes listening on non-priviliged ports (1025 - 65535) on a single 
system (actually per IP-address unless the processes listen on 0.0.0.0 like TSM 
does). You'll probably not be able to fit enough memory or CPUs in your box to 
run all of those servers at any usable performance. I'd guess that with a 
wintel box more that 1 TB off RAM would be a challenge, so with say 20 GB of 
RAM for a single instance, you'll not be able to fit more that 50 instances 
based on the amount of RAM you'll need, and probably if you account for at 
least 2 CPU cores for an instance.

> 
> 2)      Is there a limit to the number of files the a TSM client can back
> up?  ( I have found an unofficial document that specifies that TSM's HSM
> product can handle about 100 Million files, but again I can't seem to locate
> it in IBM's HSM documentation)
> 

Yes there is. I've been told that there is a hard limit on the number of files 
that a TSM server can have backed up in it's entire lifespan. I've never heard 
of anybody ever running into that limit. 6.3 has been tested for 4 TB 
databases, with about 500 bytes in the DB for each file, that would amount to 
8,000 million files, if I'm not mistaking. 

> 3)      Lastly, with regard to TSM's underlying DB2 datbase, are there
> significant issues with memory management?   (I have checked the DB2 APARS
> up to DB2 version 9.8 and there seem to be a number of fixes for things such
> as memory leaks, but I do not know how many of those apply to TSM and how
> many are from general DB2 usage)
> 
> 

Issues as in bugs? Or issues as in BD2 is happier with more memory? More is 
better for real life workloads....

> 
> Thanks in advance!
> 
> 
> 
> Jim Neal
> 
> Sr. TSM Administrator
> 
> U.C. Berkeley Storage and Backup Group

-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten/Kind Regards,

Remco Post
r.post AT plcs DOT nl
+31 6 248 21 622