Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments

Simplifies the management of the backup and restore processes for virtual machines

• Can be completely managed from within the vCenter client interface or from the IBM Tivoli Storage Manager administration console.
• Allows backup administrators (or VMware administrators) to create a backup policy or restore a virtual machine with just a few clicks.
• Supports VMware vSphere 4 and vSphere 5 environments.
• Unifies recovery management through integration with Tivoli Storage Manager to eliminate the need for separate point solutions for advanced virtual machine data protection.

Enables faster, more frequent protection for virtual machines

• Provides improved frequency of backups to reduce the amount of data at risk in a virtualized environment.
• Provides faster recovery of data to reduce downtime in a virtualized environment following a failure.
• Supports a broad range of virtualized applications, and may be combined with application-aware software such as IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Databases or IBM Tivoli Storage Manager for Mail to provide application-consistent snapshot backups.
• Integrates with and extends the role of Tivoli Storage Manager in providing data protection services to virtualized applications in production environments. These include backup and recovery, online database and application protection, disaster recovery, data reduction, bare-machine recovery, space management and archiving and retrieval.

Eliminates overhead with centralized vStorage backup

• Utilizes VMware’s vStorage APIs for Data Protection, including block-level incremental backups based on VMware’s Changed Block Tracking. Periodic full backups take a nondisruptive snapshot at the virtual machine image level.
• Supports multiple virtual machines with one Tivoli Storage Manager agent.
• Reduces workload on the virtual machines, allowing other operations to continue during backup.
• Eliminates the need for traditional backup windows by continuously capturing data changes at the block level.
• Supports LAN-free data transfer from the VMware server’s storage to the backup server. This preserves bandwidth for other users.

Retrieves data from image-level backups

• Provides flexible recovery options for file, volume and image from a single-pass backup.
• In a file restore operation, the administrator launches the Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments restore on the vStorage backup server, accesses a point-in-time view of the data in the storage pool using Tivoli Storage Manager and performs a drag-and-drop of the desired files. The file restore operation can also be initiated from within the virtual guest environment.(This feature is only available for Windows and Linux operating systems.)
• For a full disk volume restore, Tivoli Storage Manager for Virtual Environments mounts the point-in-time snapshot for that volume (mounted to the recovery volume) and makes it available immediately to users and applications. The actual data recovery happens in the background. All requests to write to and read from the volume are handled first, providing full, near-normal performance during the recovery process. (This feature is only available for Windows and Linux operating systems.)
• VM image-level restores provide the recovery of not only the data but the virtualized computing environment—from operating systems, applications and patches to upgrades and custom configurations.