Manually setting up the data mover nodes in a vSphere environment

If you offload backup workloads to a vStorage backup server in a vSphere environment, you can manually set up the data mover nodes to run the operation and move the data to the IBM Spectrum Protect server.

A physical data mover node typically uses the SAN to back up and restore data. If you configure data mover nodes to directly access the storage volumes, turn off automatic drive letter assignment. If you do not turn off letter assignments, the client on the data mover node might corrupt the Raw Data Mapping (RDM) of the virtual disks. If the RDM of the virtual disks is corrupted, backups fail.

Required services: The data mover requires the client acceptor service, the remote client agent service, and the data mover scheduler service as described in the following steps. If you remove a data mover from a datacenter, uninstall and delete these services for the data mover.
Important: If the data mover is installed on the same Windows system as the Data Protection for VMware vSphere GUI and Create Services was selected during the data mover configuration, the following steps are not required.
In a standard Data Protection for VMware environment, a separate dsm.opt file (Windows) or dsm.sys file stanza (Linux) is used for each data mover node. When multiple data mover nodes on a vStorage Backup Server are used for data deduplication, and these nodes have authority to move data for the same datacenter node, then each dsm.opt file or dsm.sys file stanza must include a different value for the dedupcachepath option. For best results, specify a different schedlogname and errorlogname option for each dsm.opt file or dsm.sys file stanza.
Note: All steps in these procedure are completed on the vStorage backup server.

A physical data mover node typically uses the SAN to back up and restore data. If you configure the data mover node to directly access the storage volumes, turn off automatic drive letter assignment. If you do not turn off letter assignments, the client on the data mover node might corrupt the Raw Data Mapping (RDM) of the virtual disks. If the RDM of the virtual disks is corrupted, backups fail.

Restriction: Data Protection for VMware does not support scheduling the vStorage backup server used as the data mover to back up itself. Make sure that the vStorage backup server is excluded from its own schedules. Use a different vStorage backup server to back up of the vStorage backup server used as the data mover.

Gathering the information you will need

Data Mover information must be collected from the GUI host configuration wizard at the time of creating the data mover node in the wizard. See the topic Configuration worksheet for details of the required information. Gather and record the following information before you manually configure a data mover:
  • vCenter user name and password
  • Data mover node name
  • Data mover password
  • Data mover sample options
The Data mover name and sample options file can be gathered at a subsequent stage by the following process:
  1. Open a web browser and enter the GUI web server address: for example, https://guihost.mycompany.com:9081/TsmVMwareUI/
  2. Log in with the vCenter user name and password, and ensure that Configuration mode is selected.
  3. In the configuration wizard, go to the Data Mover Nodes page.
  4. Locate the data mover that you want, and click View.
  5. Copy the sample options from the View tab to the options file.
  6. Update these options if and as required for your environment
The minimum sets of required options for each platform are provided in these topics: