As more companies are virtualizing their infrastructure based on VMware ESX, more need are araising for a disaster recovery solutions supporting these enviornments. VizionCore vReplicator & Veeam backup & Replicaiton are two host based replication solutions supporting VMware.  If you are planning to build a DR for your VMware Infrastructure & Storage replication is not an option you might want to look at the following comparison: VizionCore vReplicator (esxReplicator) vs Veeam Backup & Replication. It will help you pick up the one matching your DR requirment for your VMware Infrastructure.

I hope that help you out, and leave a comment of your thoughts on the comparison as ITComparison team will be following this post as well the comments on their blog at: VizionCore vReplicator vs Veeam Backup & Replication Blog Post

If you have been using IBM Blades for a while, you would know that currently IBM does not offer any Intel four socket blades. The only four socket blades offered by IBM at the moment is an AMD blade. IBM Has not offered a four processor intel blade for over 2 years, since HS40. If you were hoping to get a four socket intel blade into your IBM Chassis then read below.

As part of his keynote address today, Sean Maloney, General Manager at Intel, disclosed that IBM will soon have a 4 socket blade using the next generation Intel® Xeon® processor. The blade is based on IBM’s next generation of X-Architecture, eX5. This new blade extends IBM’s influence in the fast growing high-end x86 marketplace, and opens up a range of new application environments for clients.

My colleague has been facing a problem installing Windows 2003 R2 SP1 as boot from SAN on IBM HS22 connected to IBM Storage DS4700 for over 2 days. The new HS22 is using the Qloigc QMI2572 with IBM Part#46m6067. Windows was accepting the driver, but when ever it try to start setting up windows the following error used to popup:

The file ql2300.sys is corrupted. press any key to continue.

Please see the image below illustrating the error message.

(hs22 Qlogic QMI2572 boot from san error snapshot)

The IBM Systems Director 6.1 has the feature to deploy its common agent remotely, though it seem the problem facing most people is when they try to deploy the agent using the wizard provided they get an error saying  it cannot proceed because the package has to be imported. It is a pretty annoying error. What makes it worse if you go and try to read the IBM System Director 6.1 manual you will find it say to resolve this you will need to download the tcdriver packages, but never refer to where you can get it at. After a long search on the internet & talking to IBM support I found the tcdriver packages download link to be as below:

As IBM Director 6 has been released few months back & with all the publicity IBM has made about its enhancement. I thought I will try it out. Although I had a quite good experience with IBM Director 5.2, I found it a bit tough to start with IBM Director 6 without returning to the manual. It seems IBM has totally rebuilt the product from scratch with a totally new interface & new terminology.

After catching the important terminology changes from IBM Director 5.2 to IBM Systems Director 6 life has become way easier with the new Systems Director. For that reason I have decided to share these new Terminology with all of you IBM Director 5.2 admins & gurus to have a nicer start with IBM Director 6 than what I had.

I have heard it often of TSM administrators wondering why the TSM reclamation process is slow & clumsy process. The good part most of these administrators is that they understand the importance of reclamation & how it help their backup become more efficient & save on tapes, though they still wonder why it takes too longs. I had decided to give my point of view on this.

1- One of the main reasons for the reclamation process to be slow is that you don’t have enough tape drives. If you have only one tape drive into your library then you can have a seriously slow & none efficient reclamation process, as each time you need to reclaim a tape, TSM will have to copy the full tape to the disk, then reclaim the volume on the disk to another tap. So you are basically repeating the reclamation process twice.

Each component of IBM Tivoli Storage Manager has its system & Software requirements. Below I am bringing your attention to the requirements of each component. Please visit IBM website for the latest requirements for IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Components as its an always updated document.

System Requirement & Supported Platforms for IBM Tivoli TSM Server

IBM TSM Server System Requirements:

IBM Tivoli Storage manager Server requirements are specific to the operating system & architect it will run on. Below are the requirements for the most commonly used platforms.

OK, OK, you had just received your IBM Tivoli Storage Manager 5.5 CDs. I can guess, ah you are asking what are you going to do with all these CDs. Guess what!! You might only need 3 of them, or might need all of them depending on the enviornment you have. IBM tend to ship you all the CDs at once, and leave it up to you to use what you have licensed. Below is the list of CDs you should recieve with your IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Package.

IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Server

• Operational Reporting
• Administration Center
• Linux Server
• HP-UX Server
• Solaris Server
• Windows Server
• AIX Server

Finally Day two is ready to be published. I know quite few readers were waiting for it. The surprise we have promised about that our tutorial from Day 3 on will include videos of the steps we used in the installation and configuration. We are sorry that the video quality is not too high & does not include sound, but that is how much efforts our team is able to handle at the moment. We are considering to release a new set of video & re-clean up the whole tutorial after finishing it. So stay tuned.

VMware VMs image level backup using TSM was not straight forward process till TSM 5.5. Up to version 5.4, you needed to run into all kind of pre & post backup scripts to backup your virtual machines using VCB & TSM. Integrating TSM & VCB was a hassle, & most companies were running after third party solutions to intermediate the integration (ex: vRanger, ESXpress, & so on). In TSM 5.5, the situation got a lot better as IBM introduced the backup vm command which canceled the need for the nasty post & pre-script commands. Though till TSM 6.0 there was no GUI for backing up virtual machines using VCB in TSM. The good news in TSM 6.0 the integration of TSM & VCB has got to be quite easy and effective. In addition, for all of you out there who is not ready to upgrade just yet I have a very good news for you. The good news is that you can use the TSM 6.0 client with your old 5.4 & 5.5 and even maybe older version of TSM, so you don’t have to upgrade your TSM Server to get the benefit of the new TSM Client features. The example below in fact is using IBM TSM 6.0 client with TSM Server 5.5.