I agree that using the "in guest" client in a VM is easier for back up; the big 
deal is when it comes time to do a DR.
Then having the VM image from TSM/VE is easier to do your full machine restores 
with.  (I'm willing to do most anything to avoid having to deal with a MS 
System State restore!)

As far as scheduling, my customer uses the plugin to create the schedule for 
the VM's.

But, once you do that, go over to the TSM server/TIP and look at the schedule 
it created; it's just a normal TSM client schedule, but with a bunch of options 
that are specific to VE.  So you can doctor it on the server side.
That seems to be the easiest route - create with the plug in, tweak with the 
TIP.

Creating separate schedules for specific VM's is tricky because of VMotion. 
The beauty of being able to wild-card the schedule with the ESX hostname, is 
that if/when VMotion moves a VM to another ESX host, the backup for that ESX 
host will detect the "new" VM and it will still get backed up.

To set up schedules that are specific to a single VM, you are going to have to 
be a little sneaky about using multiple schedules and wildcards so that you 
still can back up that VM when it moves, and not back it up multiple times.  
Although that shouldn't be a big deal in terms of data with these VE 
block-level backups (which are so delightfully small!), I can foresee 
unpleasantness if you have multiple backup runs creating overlapping VMWare 
snapshots. 

The only thing we've really had to work around, though, is making sure we don't 
run backups at the same time that other software is running that also uses 
snapshots.  We havent' tried to isolate a schedule for a single VM.

YMMV
    

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Mike De Gasperis
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2013 2:16 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] TSM for VE 6.4 Questions/Recommendations

I posted this up on the adsm.org forum but I'm hoping I get more hits here.

We're getting ready to implement the agent at one of our facilities and I'm 
curious to see how everyone else is accomplishing some things we did relatively 
easy the "old" way.

How are you scheduling certain VM's at different time frames? Wondering if 
folks are using the TSM scheduler to do it and how that looks or if the vCenter 
plugin has been an easier option for you.

Policy and retention wise how are you handling VM's that may require a longer 
retention than others? Wondering if folks are just using separate management 
classes within the same policy or using multiple data move nodes. I'm also 
wondering if you're using multiple management classes are you just using 
includes within the dsm.opt or specifying in the TSM schedule somehow?

Collocation wise we're using physical tape to store these VM backups, control 
data will be in a disk area. Are you collocating by file space for these VM 
backups given the way they're stored or are you using multiple data mover nodes 
to work what needs collocation what doesn't? My main concern is the file level 
recovery is painfully slow on physical tape, going and buying a bunch of disk 
or VTL isn't a very cost effective option for us unfortunately.

I'm struggling to come up with the best practices on how to accomplish these 
items which to me we did so simply before with the in guest backup method. I 
know a lot of questions but recommendations and real world experience on these 
items would be invaluable.