We're delighted to see that IBM has expanded vmWare support significantly with the 6.2.2 release by redesigning the TSM client to use the vmWare vStorage API for full image backups directly to TSM (without using legacy VCB support). We have installed the TSM 6.2.2 release for Windows (and selected custom install to install the vmWare components) on a virtual machine designed as a backup proxy within our vmWare vSphere 4.1 environment. The backup proxy is a Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit guest configured as required in the TSM 6.2.2 documentation. Our initial testing with 6.2.2 has revealed that TSM is capable of backing some simple virtual machines but with other "more-complicated" virtual machines the TSM client typically crashes while attempting to backup an image of the machine.
We have narrowed the issue down to the networking configuration within vSphere. We have four (4) clusters defined in vSphere 4.1 and on every cluster except for our testing cluster we have created virtual switch and port groups to manage the network traffic on the hosts and virtual machines. The testing cluster has the simple vmWare supplied default network configuration with only a single "VM Network" connection available to virtual machines. All virtual machines in this cluster can be backed up with TSM 6.2.2 without issue. However on our other clusters most of the virtual machine backups crash the TSM client. Though extensive troubleshooting we found that we can simply delete the virtual network card from the virtual machine and TSM backs up the virtual machine perfectly so we know that TSM is crashing because of something related to the network configuration on the guest. However as you can appreciate removing the virtual NIC card isn't an acceptable solution for our prod uction systems. We've also been able to confirm that we can take a virtual machine that crashes TSM and move it to the testing cluster (with the simple "VM Network" connection configuration) and the virtual machine backs up without issue. We have a substantial vSphere 4.1 environment with 26 hosts, 521 guests, 4 clusters, 11 networks and 44 datastores. We have an XIV SAN serving vmWare and use IBM server hardware. We are interested to hear what others may be experiencing with the new vStorage API full image backups in TSM 6.2.2. Are there any other TSM customers that are experiencing issues with the TSM client crashing while attempting to backup virtual machines? +---------------------------------------------------------------------- |This was sent by [email protected] via Backup Central. |Forward SPAM to [email protected]. +----------------------------------------------------------------------
