I need some feedback from our community.Earlier this year my IT department switched our backup systems to Veeam. We're backing up the entire virtual machine via snapshots and copying those backups between data centers (geographically apart). Both data centers have actively used servers (SQL and others) so the backup copies go both ways. The VM snapshots get rolled into a synthetic full every evening. From a DR perspective this seems pretty cool. The only pain points are the massive amount of block changes that the SQL servers endure. To me this is to be expected as the data changes within the database almost constantly with some of our systems. I also run nightly full backups (as per our policy requirements) so that creates more block changes on the backup drives. My backup stored proc deletes the existing backup before creating a new backup due to storage constraints. That creates additional block changes that have to be rolled into the Veeam synthetic fulls and copied across the pipe to the other data center.The amount of block changes with the SQL servers seems to be such a pain point that now management wants to eliminate all native SQL backups and switch to only using Veeam's application-consistent backups for restoring the databases. While the functionality is sound and it does meet our policy requirements, I've never heard of a company that actually went as far as completely eliminated native SQL backups and just flush the logs (backup log to null device). It has always been other backup solutions to compliment the native SQL backups.The feedback I'm looking for is opinions and testimonials from anyone who has gone down this line of thought and considered eliminated native SQL backups and just going with an application-consistent VM backup (Veeam or other). Here are a few articles I came across this weekend while trying to find some examples of people who have already done this. I didn't find any actual examples.The Accidental DBA (Day 12 of 30): Backups: VM Snapshotshttp://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/jonathan/the-accidental-dba-day-12-of-30-backups-vm-snapshotsApplication consistency and Agent / Agentless protection of virtual machine backupshttp://hyper-v-backup.unitrends.com/application-consistency-agent-agentless-protection-virtual-machine-backupsSupport policy for Microsoft SQL Server products that are running in a hardware virtualization environmenthttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/956893Veeam v6 and SQL backups(1 version older of current Veeam software)http://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-replication-f2/veeam-v6-and-sql-backups-t10443.htmlVeeam Backup & Replication 7.0 for VMware (VMware Tools Quiescence)http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/70/vsphere/tools_quiescence.html
↧