Jackie is a IT engineer who likes to automate things as much as possible. To him, blogging is a good way to learn and share. Check out his Medium site, Blog and GitHub.
If you would like to contact him, please feel free to email (support+blog@jackiechen.org) or find him on 
Jackie Chen's IT Workshop 
Great job you’ve done with the tinycore linux / citrix receiver combo! Many thanks for the step-by step instructions you’ve saved me so much time!
No worries. Enjoy!
Hi Jackie!! Great blog man, keep that good work and passion about sharing. I will like to talk with you about DiffFull Restores of SQL Server user databases with IBM TDP SQL because i am having an error and maybe you know how to fix it.
No worries, mate. I am glad you like it. I will shoot you an email later Today. Reply me with all the information you have and let me see what I can help.
Great Job with your blog! I want to share some TSM experience with you, if you want we can do it in skype.
Hi Marco, Thanks for your good comments. I don’t use skype that often. But please feel free to email me if you have anything want to share – support[AT]jackiechen.org
Very good blog on TSM 6.2 trainings. It need to give a session in a team and was looking for crisp n clear notes.
Great Job !!
Hello, Great site, any chance you can create some training on TSM Fastback and TSM VE? Specifically Fastbask implementation, install, config and how to setup backups on this weird looking gui. Can’t find anything on this except for IBM’s user guide.
Keep up the great work!
Hello, any chance you can provide some training on TSM Fastback? Implementation, install, config and how to setup backups and do restores using this product. Can’t find anything on IBM’s site or anywhere other than the USER guide.
Thanks, and keep up the great work!
Also looking for TSM VE…but for now FASTBACK is my priority.
Hi Jackie,
I newly installed standalone TSM 6.3 server 2008 and want to configure IBM tape library 3573.
I have done zoning and two drives are visible on device manager side.
Now what are the steps to configure tape library with tsm 6.3 as i am new with backup.
Yes, now you need to define the library and drive. Retrieve more info about the following commands in IBM information center.
DEFINE LIBRARY
DEFINE DRIVE
HI Jackie Chen,
i have configured TSM baclient 6.4 for windows server 2012 r2 .It is de-dup enabled at OS level.
Backup performance is very poor as data has rehydrate .Please let me know
do you have any knowledge on this.
Hi Srikanth,
According to the IBM article (http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21197133), TSM 6.4 does not offically support Windows 2012 R2. You may need to install the 7.1 which I have not tried yet.
In terms of how the Windows 2012 deduplication impacts the backup software, here is a good video to watch: http://searchdatabackup.techtarget.com/video/How-Windows-Server-2012-dedupe-affects-backup
Personally, I don’t enable the deduplication on Windows 2012 servers which are backed up by TSM 6.4. As there may be some issues when you need to restore the data. (http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1IC92388)
Jackie
Hi,
I’ve been tasked with coming up with a solution to the following:
We need to design and test a DR plan using TSM for our virtualised (VMWare) SQL Server clusters.
Each Windows 2008 R2 cluster has an active and passive node, physical Raw Device Mappings (pRDM’S) and has several instances of SQL Server 2008 R2.
SQL Server backups are done separately at the moment. We have various Tivoli products including TSM and TDP.
We have encountered several problems using the TSM Client to backup the cluster nodes due to incompatibility between TSM, VMWare and the pRDM’s (see http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd).
So do you have any idea or know of any guides how we would go about backing up our VMWare cluster nodes and SQL Server databases using TSM/TDP so we could then restore them in a consistent state at our remote DR site?
Thanks
Hi Peter,
I break your questions into two:
1) How to backup a VMware VM with pRDM?
As far as know, TSM does not support backing up pRDM so far. If you want to backup the VM which has pRDM disk, you have to exclude the pRDM disk with adding -vmprocessvmwithprdm=yes in your backup job (see more: http://jackiechen.org/2012/11/26/tsm-6-3-backup-vmware-vm-with-physical-rdm-or-independent-disks/).
What is in on your pRDM disk? If it is only data. Why you need to backup the whole pRDM disk? Only backup the data. I assume it is SQL DB files. If yes, then use TSM for MS SQL. If you still want to backup the whole pRDM disk. You can do it in your SAN, something like LUN mirroring or LUN snapshot (it depends on your SAN’s capabilities).
2) How to backup Windows 2008 R2 SQL cluster?
To backup the SQL cluster, here is the how-to manual: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tsminfo/v6/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.ibm.itsm.client.doc%2Fc_cfg_clus_windows.html
Jackie
Hi Jackie,
Thanks for replying!
I sort of realised the answer to question 1) – I just wanted to make sure there was no alternatives. We don’t have to backup the pRDM’s with TSM I just wondered if we could do it as one ‘job’. I would prefer to backup my data using my own tool as that does exactly what we require…
In the 2nd link would the cluster backup be application consistent? (I’m thinking SQL Server here 🙂 )
So when it comes to restoring the cluster nodes with TSM, I presume the cluster nodes need to be restored with the same names? (although that’ll create problems for us when testing). I searched for ‘restore cluster’ on the IBM site but I couldn’t find anything that actually told me how to do it. Do you know if there’s a guide?
Again thanks!
Hi Peter,
You missed the point of backing up cluster. The backup does not backup the cluster server itself. It backs up the SQL database in the cluster environment. In other words, TSM is able to backs up the database no matter on which cluster node the DB is.
The worst case is that you lose the whole cluster, just rebuild the cluster and restore the database (the database files are what need protection, not the cluster). If you want to test the database restore, just build up a test SQL server and restore the database to it. If you want to test the VM restore, remember you need to restore it to another location. But you can not bring the VM online, otherwise you will receive the IP conflicts warnings.
Jackie
Hi Jackie,
It’s ok I have the databases covered. What we really don’t want to have to do is rebuild the clusters, that’s my main point. We have many custom settings for example Microsoft Dynamics CRM, SharePoint, Reporting Services etc. There are shares and permissions, registry settings, third-party applications etc that would have to be manually recreated/installed.
So is it impossible to backup and restore our VMWare clusters with TSM? (by restore I mean restore both nodes and have an application consistent cluster again. The databases would come later but that’s another question).
Thanks for your help.
Excellent work here (and if this is THE Jackie Chen who started in the Sunyard building) I can attest to the excellent quality of his methods and expertise.
Hi jackie,
I need support on TSM server 6.3, we have different management policy like:
1: Daily Backup
2: Monthly backup
3: Yearly Backup
We are using LTO 4 tapes and IBM tape library, the issue is for Daily backups we have 40 days retention period policy so the tape cartridge should be expire after 40 and this was happening very fine..but now due to some unknown reason cartridges are expiring in 2 to 3 days frequently…Please assist me what should i take care off and resolve this and how to investigate,
Thanks
Noor
Check the copygroup settings, and also ensure there are enough scratch tapes.
Ok I will check the copygroup settings, but copy backups are running fine and enough tapes are in scratch..let me give you example if i scratch one tape today and backup then today’s backup is copied on that tape and that tape should be expired after 40 days but that shows us in vault retrieve after 2 or 3 days ..and if we check the details of that tapes it shows empty..
Hi Jackie,
Thank you so much for your blogs about configuring TSM for Exchange. Very easy to follow!
I have Exchange 2013 DAG with BA7.1.1, TDP 7.1.1 and FlashCopy Manager 4.1
Everything works great except Mailbox Restore Browser. I can view the mailboxes but I can’t browse the content for any of it.
I couldn’t find any information about this behaviour anywhere. Could you help?
Regards,
Toma
Heya Jackie. All this time i’ve known you and didn’t realise you had a blog. Came across it quite by accident. Nice site!
Can you do a Citrix Thin Client using ubuntu latest lite and Citrix Workspace App 1901 for Linux?
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