June 9, 2014 at 7:07 am
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 Snapshots
http://www.sqlskills.com/blogs/jonathan/the-accidental-dba-day-12-of-30-backups-vm-snapshots
Application consistency and Agent / Agentless protection of virtual machine backups
Support policy for Microsoft SQL Server products that are running in a hardware virtualization environment
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956893
Veeam 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.html
Veeam Backup & Replication 7.0 for VMware (VMware Tools Quiescence)
http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/70/vsphere/tools_quiescence.html
June 9, 2014 at 7:16 am
Removing edit.
May 19, 2015 at 2:28 pm
I know this is almost a year old, but did you ever this answered? My company is looking at the same thing so I'd like to get informed on how well Veeam works and if there have ever been any issues.
February 2, 2016 at 8:58 am
VEEAM does not play nicely with availability groups. We've had it freeze one part of the cluster due to snapshot deletion and cause it to fail over, and it just seems to start failing for some unknown reason and stop doing transaction log backups.
DPM works a bit better, but i prefer to do my sql backups through sql and use dpm for tapes and long term retention of those from a file share.
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