The Best Way to Backup a Virtual Machine

New Blogpost on the brand new Tectrade blog written by myself on the best way to backup a virtual machines - Tectrade - Your Information Partner - The Best Way to Backup a Virtual Machine

Keep your eyes on this blog for some more interesting posts on Data Protection, Data Storage, Server Consolidation & Data Placement over the coming months.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments 6.3

In a nutshell TSM for VE provides protection for virtual machines by offloading backup workloads to a proxy server (vStorage Backup Server) and provides multiple restore capabilities including full VM restore, file level restore and instant restore. TSM for VE 6.3 contains several components which when combined ensure the protection of your virtalised environment these components are shown within the diagram below.

VMware Consolidated Backup - Conversion Error - **Useful Workaround**

Prior to the release of the vStorage API many of us utilised VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) as a method to backup virtual machines within our VI3 environments. 


If you have seen the following error on attempting to run the conversion via VMware Converter of a VCB backup image then you will find the following article of use. 


A general system error occurred: at line number 8, not well formed (invalid token) & 
A general system error occurred: at line number 9, not well formed (invalid token)


After raising a call with VMware we had no joy in attempting to resolve the issue which apparently was due to the 2 services running in the backup machine with the issue due to be fixed in the Montana release (Summer 2011) For those experiencing the error at DR you may find the following workaround of interest.