TSM for VE 6.4 Plugin - FMM16016E An error occurred while connecting to the Derby DB

Came across an interesting issue recently in that I could no longer access the TSM for VE 6.4 plugin with the following error messages appearing:

Whilst this isn't disastrous as the TSM for VE schedules continue to run, it makes monitoring and reporting of environments a pain. TSM administrators have to revert back to utilising the dsmsched and dsmerror logs for the datamover nodes rather than the shiny plugin.

Ok so whats gone wrong? Last night my plugin was working fine and this morning it isn't. In rare cases, the vmcli database might get corrupted because the service.properties file is deleted or becomes corrupt. This can happen when the vmcli daemon process is killed while it is writing to this file. In this case, messages similar to the following example will appear in the vmcli log file:

TSM Automatic Client Updates

New Blogpost up on the Tectrade blog on TSM Automatic Client Updates detailing the benefits and configuration steps involved 
Tectrade - Your Information Partner - TSM Automatic Client Updates

Upgrading from TSM 5.5 to TSM 6.3

With the End of Support date for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 likely to be confirmed in the near future it’s time for all businesses that still have TSM 5.5 instances running to look at upgrading to TSM 6.3.

So apart from the fact 5.5 is approaching EOL what other benefits do you get from upgrading to TSM 6.3? Well for a start the underlying database has changed from btree to DB2 significantly improving the scalability, performance and reliability of TSM, providing you with the ability to protect more data with less TSM servers. Additional enterprise features such as server side deduplication, client side deduplication, node replication and automatic client updates are also introduced within TSM 6.3. The table below provides a very high level version comparison. 

	TSM v5.5 (Q2 07)	TSM V6.3 (Q4 11)
TSM Server Capacity (Objects)	0.5 Billion	4 Billion
Disaster Recovery (TSM EE)	DR Planning	Client Data Replication
Reporting and Monitoring	Yes - Limited via Operational Reporting	Yes - Tivoli Monitoring (Customised Cognos reports can be created via Tivoli Common Reporting )
VMware Support	In-guest	TSM for VE v6.3
Target-Side Data Deduplication	NA	Yes
Source-Side Data Deduplication	NA	Yes
Automatic Client Software Updates	NA	All O/S
Unified Recovery Management	NA	TSM Suite for Unified Recovery