TSM for Virtual Machines LAN Free Backup Limitations

Faster VMware virtual machine backup. Using LAN Free, you can only start backup for as many virtual machines as you have tape drives available. This puts a severe limitation on the number of virtual machines that you can simultaneously backup. This combined with the limitations of Windows, create a very slow backup environment that does not effectively utilize the bandwidth available for a Windows Proxy server. for example, in our environment, we can only start 4 VM backups on 4 tape drives. This limits our backup throughput too much, when we have 85 VMs and over 35 TB of storage to do a full backup on. The throughput is terrible. It doesn't matter how fast your Fibre Channel network, or SAN disk is. You are limited to just four backups at a time.

There needs to be a way to multi-stream backups to a single tape drive. While this doesn't always produce great restore speeds, there needs to be a happy medium between the two and the administrator should have a way to configure this kind of backup/restore, if he/she wants it that way. Now, we are limited, because there is no such functionality, which causes a huge backup window. A multi-streamed environment would greatly decrease the backup window, allowing us to finish backups more quickly. Yes, it might slow down restores a little, but it wouldn't be that bad. In fact, I also manage a Legato Networker environment that allows me to do that and the backups and restores there are just fine, even with a 10 to 1 stream ration (10 simultaneous backups going to 1 tape drive). So, don't tell us that it cannot be done. It is being done.