Periodic full backup scenario

This scenario provides an example of how to define a weekly full VM backup and daily full VM incremental backups of the VMs.

About this task

This task describes how to schedule a full VMware backup of the guests that runs once a week and a daily incremental backup of the same VMware guests. This configuration ensures that there are frequent backups of the VMware guests and reduces the size of each backup.
Tip: There is no limit to how many full and incremental backups you can take. However, if you do not run a full backup regularly, the size of incremental backups can increase. This scenario ensures that the incremental backups do not get too large.

Procedure

  1. Define a full VM backup for each of the VMware guests.
  2. Separate the pool of VMware guests into groups to reduce backup time. The backup time is shorter because each group is backed up by a separate instance on the Tivoli® Storage Manager client scheduler, and they are running in parallel on the off-host backup server.
  3. Schedule the full VM backup that runs once a week.
  4. Configure daily backups.
  5. Schedule the incremental backups to run daily.
  6. Specify compression and deduplication to reduce the backup size of the VMware backups. From the VMware guests, update the Tivoli Storage Manager client backup-archive client options file:
    • Windows operating systemsSpecify these options in the dsm.opt options file.
    • Linux operating systemsSpecify these options in the dsm.sys file, in the stanza for the data mover node.
    1. Enable compression by adding the following option:
      compression yes.
      Tip: You can only enable compression if you are using client deduplication and if deduplication has been enabled for the storage pool.
    2. Enable deduplication by adding the following option:
      deduplication yes.