Anthony, What you say is just what EMC said, and that is that their preference is that all their customers install the Avamar client directly on each VM. But this is not ideal to us for two reasons: 1) In the main environment I support, there are about 700 VMs and growing. That is a lot of Avamar clients to log in to and configure. The beauty of VCB is that it doesn't require a client install on each machine; there is less administration per VM, which means less time. 2) With the VCB method, the VMware farm does not bear the burden of CPU and I/O and memory consumption involved in performing the backups; that is shifted to the proxy server. Running the Avamar client backup on 700 separate VMs is going to create a burden on the VMware farm. EMC will hand-wave that away by saying that the Avamar client is very light, but in our testing so far it is about even with, or perhaps slightly less than the TSM clients. EMC told us it is a tiny fraction of the performance requirements of the TSM client, but we have not found that to be the case. Either way would work, I agree, but I think there are valid trade-offs depending on the size of your environment, and the amount of backups you do each day.
Best Regards, John D. Schneider The Computer Coaching Community, LLC Office: (314) 635-5424 Toll Free: (866) 796-9226 Cell: (314) 750-8721 -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [ADSM-L] TSM vs Avamar From: leontom <tsm-fo...@backupcentral.com> Date: Wed, June 24, 2009 6:01 pm To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Hi, If you could accept some additional information from an EMC insider... Actually ,with Avamar, VCB is not really needed for the main backup operations. Indeed, the best is to install the files and applications agents directly within the VMs. In this way, you'll be able to make full daily snap-up of all your VMs with a really minimal impact on your ESX plateform, thanks to the source-based dedup. VCB could, maybe, remains a commodity for full VM quick disaster recovery. Regards, Anthony [quote="John D. Schneider"]Hi! 5) Backing up VMs, because they are so similar to each other, sounds like an idea application for deduplication. However, the VMWare VCB proxy solution today is very bad. But in every Avamar presentation I have been to, they completely gloss over how it really works. The way it works today requires each separate VM to be in its own group and its own schedule. In our case, with 600VMs, that was going to be a nightmare. Sometime in the third quarter when VMWare comes out with its next version of VCB, it is supposed to be much better. +---------------------------------------------------------------------- |This was sent by anthony.mor...@gmail.com via Backup Central. |Forward SPAM to ab...@backupcentral.com. +----------------------------------------------------------------------