Technical Blog Post
Abstract
Recommendations for Scheduling with TSM for Virtual Environments
Body
Overview
Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments - Data Protection for VMware provides the ability to schedule backups of a large collection of VMware virtual machines providing an automated backup solution that allows for the automatic discovery of newly created virtual machines as well as providing parallel backup of multiple virtual machines. This can be implemented in a way which minimizes the impact to any single VMware ESX or ESXi host. This document covers the following topics related to setting up scheduled VMware backups using Tivoli Storage Manager Data Protection for VMware:
- Using the TSM asnode capability to allow multiple backup instances to store the VMware backups under a common TSM namespace.
- Setting up multiple TSM backup instances where each backup instance is responsible for protecting the virtual machines on one VMware ESX server.
- Defining TSM schedule definitions that allow for processing VMware backups using a periodic full backup followed by daily incremental backups.
The examples and information described in this document depend on capabilities provided in the 6.2.3 TSM Backup-Archive client for Windows that are enabled as part of the TSM for Virtual Environments 6.2 product. The term ESX server which is used throughout this document is assumed to cover both ESX and ESXi.
Using the ASNODE Capability
The TSM Backup-Archive client and server provide the ability to grant a proxy relationship between two nodes such that one of those nodes can be used for purposes of authentication while the other is used to store backup data. This proxy relationship is defined with the grant proxy command on the TSM server, and the node transition is controlled using the -asnode option on the backup-archive client. There are two types of nodes involved:
agent node
An agent node is used to authenticate to the TSM server, and is also associated to a specific scheduled job on the TSM server using the define association command. An agent node should be created for each TSM backup instance which in most cases will be one agent node for each VMware ESX server. The agent nodes will have proxy granted to a specific target node.
target node
The target node is used to store backup data for all virtual machines in a group. A group should correspond to one of the grouping types within VMware, such as, a datacenter. By having the backup instances for each ESX host all store backups to the same target nodename, problems such as redundant backups are avoided in cases where a virtual machine is migrated from one VMware host to another. Since VMware does not allow for migration across datacenters, the VMware datacenter becomes the best level of grouping to use for a target node.
UID
ibm16166677