Hi Steve, Been there, done that with VMWare backups. You can parallelize what you are doing now by installing multiple schedulers on your proxy machine. Give it 2 (or more) node names (e.g., PROXYVCB1, PROXYVCB2), install 2 schedulers, 2 dsm.opt files, give them each half the work to do. (Also no reason you can't add more proxy machines.)
That will only help the Proxy client drive multiple full backups at once, it won't improve the speed of the VCB fulls, which definitely have performance issues. VMWARE is addressing the VCB performance issue by replacing VCB altogether, so you should be looking ahead to ESX 4.0 or 4.1 for a long-term solution. In VSPHERE (ESX 4.0), VMWare has created a "Storage API" for their own backup utility called VDR, and for 3rd party vendors to write to (VCB is still supported in 4.0 as well). I have a customer using VDR+TSM with success so far. Like most VM backup products, VDR backs up only to disk. But it's part of ESX 4.0 Enterprise, it's supported by VMWare, gives you incremental and fulls, and DEDUPS, so the disk repository doesn't get all that large. It also thoughtfully keeps the sizes of the resulting files in the repository below 2GB, at least as far as we've seen, so we use TSM subfile backup to back up the repository and get stuff out to tape and vaulted. The VMWare world changes VERY fast. I went to a VMWare UG last week, and the VMWare rep said 4.1 will be out this year, and will NOT support VCB at all any longer. Thus my encouragement to move ahead to something that works a different way. TSM 6.2 will be out in March, and will support the VMWare API. I don't have any doc yet explaining exactly what it will do in practical terms, but it won't be VCB. ..and congrats on the new gig.! Wanda -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ads...@vm.marist.edu] On Behalf Of Steve Harris Sent: Wednesday, March 17, 2010 6:18 PM To: ADSM-L@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: [ADSM-L] VCB backup performance Hi All Thanks to all those that responded to my "time travel" query, testing is in progress on that one. One of my customers has an issue with a burgeoning VCB infrastructure. There are two VCB proxies and a lot of VMs being backed up, TSM Server 5.5.3 and client 6.1.2. Most of this is a daily incremental and a monthly full, but there are a couple of big file-servers with lots of small files that get a daily full. VCB backups are single threaded, and we are having trouble getting through them all within the window. TSM doesn't seem to be the problem, we have increased resourceutilization on the proxy without much effect. The bottleneck seems to be the VMWare snapshot/mount/dismount parts of the process, and there is not a lot of visibility of those. 1. Is there any good doc on this process and how to improve its performance? 2. Can the proxy side be effectively parallelized, and if so how? Thanks Steve TSM Admin, Paraparaumu, New Zealand