September 20, 2024 at 10:45 am
Good morning campers!
I'm hoping to pick your collective hive brain wrt Veeam / SQL backup integration and get your advice, experiences & gotchas
I'm still at the early testing & research stages.
On a small, standalone instance, with databases set to SIMPLE it's great. No concerns.
My main concern at the moment is using the Veeam VSS snapshot on our larger / busier instances. We have some with 200+ databases over 4 AG replica over 2 sites. I'm worried about the effect on performance during the serial quiesce, potential failover triggers and what the effect of having 2 async replica over a WAN with slower response times might be.
My spider senses tell me to avoid the above at all costs, but maybe I'm over thinking it? Field advice, gratefully accepted. Also any advice on how to mimic busy on a crappy REF system to demo any issues.
I also need to check that Veeam deals with log truncation properly (I'm presuming it does but have read about some issues).
Finally I want to know when backups fail. I haven't researched this so feel free to tell me to go read!
Thank you in advance.
September 20, 2024 at 1:48 pm
Hello Goodtimecharlie,
Can't tell you about a busy AG system or clusters.
We're using Veeam for a SQL Server standalone. I/O freezes about 4 seconds on our busier systems. So far transactionslog are handled correctly
You can setup notifications in Veeam Console / Veeam One when backup fails
like "[Failed] Backup myserver SQL Server Transaction Log Backup (1 VMs) 1 failed"
September 20, 2024 at 3:43 pm
You may need to play with some settings like lease timeout, health check timeout, connection timeout on the replicas and clusters.
VSS has IIRC 60 seconds to get in do its thing and get out again per databases, so by waiting for the IO to freeze and if it takes longer than the timeouts, especially if you have per database health checking enabled you could end up with problems.
But test test test.
Anything Veeam / Commvault / VSS wise needs some serious investment in the initial setup, otherwise it will just go down hill fast.
Nothing against them personally and yes they work, just places where they have been used for me, has been slap dash get it in, get it working and not think about the fine tuning / problems that it causes, so it's always been for us backup to disk natively, then get Veeam / CV / NetBackup whatever it is to backup the backup disk.
But ensure that whatever solution you put in place can meet the RTO and RPO requirements, as it could be that Veeam may not be the right tool for the DB's if it cannot give you a restore quick enough.
September 24, 2024 at 8:12 am
Thanks for the replies guys. Much appreciated.
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