TSM 6.3: Something You Should Know Before Changing VM Display Name


Please be cautious with changing the Virtual Machine’s display name in vCenter if you are using TSM for VE.  These are something you should be aware of:

1) TSM uses the VM display name as the identity of each target VM. This means if you rename a virtual machine’s display name in vCenter, TSM will think it is a new virtual machine.

Example: If you do daily incremental backup against VM-1. After you rename VM-1 to VM-01, TSM will think it is a new virtual machine that has never been fully backed up before. It will run the full backup instead of the incremental backup.

2) TSM backup will fail when backing up the virtual machine with same display name as previous but different VM UUID.

Example: If you have been using TSM to backup VM-01, for some reasons you decide to rebuild it from scratch but with the same display name VM-01. TSM backup will fail, to fix it you either delete the old backup of VM-01, or give the new VM-01 a new display name (VM-01 new) in vCenter.

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2 thoughts on “TSM 6.3: Something You Should Know Before Changing VM Display Name

  1. Hi thanks for this is there any way to force TSm to backup the new machine in this instance of th eUUID ,or if not what should the correct solution be
    thank you

    1. Hi Lawrence, I have not used TSM for a long time. This post was written 8 yeas ago! Not sure how the newer version of TSM handles that. But if you still use the old version like 6.x. The solution is to give the new VM a new name as mentioned in the item 2.

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