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.
April 7th, 2008 at 6:45 am
I am using TSM 5.5 with VCB 1.1, but I am unable to change the config to utilize a different path. Anyone else run into this situation and found a solution?
Hans
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:45 pm
I have had the same problem with the path (TSM 5.5, VCB 1.1)
I have gone through all the config files I can find but it still mounts everything to C:\mnt
Still haven’t found a fix though
June 25th, 2008 at 3:40 am
It’s true that you are unable to change to mount-path for the filelevel backup, but that’s no problem since mounting an file level vmdk doesn’t consume space on your harddrive.
For Full VM backup’s there is no integration in the BAclient yet, but you can still schedule full vm backups using their perl script which they included in the technical guide appendix a. (http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247447.pdf). You’ll have to install an perl interpetor on windows in order to use it.