Here are some commands that may be helpful. Unfortunately, VMWare’s latest readme included in the latest Consolidated Backup integration Module VMware-ibm-tsm-integration-64559 does not talk about TSM 5.5 – only 5.3, 5.3.3, and 5.4. At the time of this writing, it does not look like TSM 5.5.0.4 is fully supporting full vm backups, only file level. I have reviewed this document from IBM on using VMWare Consolidated Backup with TSM 5.5 many times and cannot find any information on full vm backups. I expect a newer tsm integration module to be out soon, as this one was made in September 2007 where the info center document is from November 2007.

VMWare
Mounting:
To manually mount a VM’s file system using vcbmounter use:
vcbmounter -h vcms.domain.com -u vcuser -p vcpass -a ipaddr:vmguest.domain.com -r c:\mnt\tsmvmbackup\filelevel -t file

To manaully mount a vm for full backup use this instead
vcbmounter -h vcms.domain.com -u vcuser -p vcpass -a ipaddr:vmguest.domain.com -r c:\mnt\tsmvmbackup\fullvm -t fullvm

unmounting:
To unmount either use:
vcbmounter -h vcms.domain.com -u vcuser -p vcpass -U c:\mnt\tsmvmbackup\fullvm\vmguest
or
vcbmounter -h vcms.domain.com -u vcuser -p vcpass -U c:\mnt\tsmvmbackup\filelevel\vmguest

Tivoli
To manually start a backup using file level against a vm.
dsmc backup vm -vmlist=vmguest -vmchost=vcmserver -vmcuser=vcuser -vmcpw=vcpassword

The ability to offload your backups to a dedicated machine is great. Especially if you run your ESX servers as close to the edge as possible. I personally have a cluster with 38 virtual machines on 2 dell 2950′s with 16 GB of ram each. I find myself assigning 512 MB of memory to a server and I will allow it more as I see fit.

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