Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager for VMware overview
IBM® Tivoli® Storage FlashCopy® Manager for VMware is a data management solution that you can use to streamline storage management in a VMware vSphere environment. You can back up and restore virtual machines, and VMware datastores.
Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager for VMware combines with the VMware vSphere API and the snapshot capabilities of storage devices to protect your environment. You can create non disruptive off-host backups for VMware virtual machines in a vSphere environment. This off-host approach facilitates faster backup operations.
You can protect virtual machines at the VMware datastore level. Datastores represent the combination of underlying physical storage resources in the VMware datacenter. A datastore is physically a Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) volume or a directory on a network-attached storage (NAS) device. A datastore can span multiple physical storage systems.
When you use this solution with Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments, you can offload and store VMware image backups on Tivoli Storage Manager server storage for long-term retention.
You can restore a single virtual machine and virtual disk to its original location or to an alternative location. In addition, you can restore an entire datastore or datastores.
- A number of ways for you to manage back up and restore operations:
- You can use one of the following user interfaces:
- A stand-alone web browser GUI. Access this interface
through a URL bookmark to the web server. For example:
https://guihost.mycompany.com:9081/TsmVMwareUI/ - An IBM Data
Protection extension that you access from the VMware vSphere Web Client.
The client connects to the web server in the vSphere environment.
You can use this extension to restore snapshot backups from the storage device or from stored images on Tivoli Storage Manager. The content is a subset of what is provided in the plug-in and web browser GUI.
- A plug-in that you access from the
Solutions and Applications pane or the Classic Solution pane of the
VMware vSphere Client. Restriction: You cannot use this plug-in, in a VMware vSphere 6 environment.
- A Data Protection for VMware command-line interface.
- A stand-alone web browser GUI. Access this interface
through a URL bookmark to the web server. For example:
- A way to schedule backup operations.
- A way to offload backups to Tivoli Storage Manager when you use Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager for VMware with Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments. You can start block-level incremental backups when you enable the VMware Change Block Tracking (CBT) feature.
The following figure illustrates an example where Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager for VMware is installed on the vStorage backup server. Optional software applications that are required to offload images to Tivoli Storage Manager also are installed on the server. The various ways to access the GUI, the connections to the VMware vCenter Server, and the associated virtual environment are displayed.
