IBM® Tivoli® Storage FlashCopy Manager software provides fast application-aware backups and restores by making use of advanced snapshot technologies in IBM storage systems. Support for VMware vSphere environments was added in version 3.1. You can back up complete datastores in just minutes while keeping virtual machines running without interruption.
 
IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager for VMware provides a vCenter GUI plug-in which is a graphical user interface (GUI) that integrates with the VMware vSphere client. It allows easy access and control of backup and restore functionality.
 
Less known is the command-line interface (vmcli) that IBM Tivoli Storage FlashCopy Manager for VMware also provides. The vmcli was designed as a dual purpose interface. The vCenter GUI plug-in interacts with FlashCopy Manager core components using the vmcli as a machine-to-machine interface, which is what the vmcli is optimized for. However, you can also use the vmcli to issue commands directly. This article describes how you can implement advanced, automated, and more flexible backup and restore operations by directly using the vmcli in combination with shell and Perl scripting. For highly dynamic vSphere environments (making extensive use of vMotion), this approach, in particular, provides more flexibility when compared to the GUI and it can also provide capabilities that are not possible using the GUI.

 

To read this article from Frank Lautenbach and Thorsten Gosert, click here.