April 8, 2011 at 8:29 am
So our company is mostly all VMWare and has now moved to Avamar (disk based backup solution) for our backup and partial DR strategy. They want to simply do backups on the .vmdk files and not put the agent on the servers to do actual SQL DB backups. When you need a restore of a database, you would have to take the file system level .mdf, .ndf, .ldf, etc. files and restore them to the appropriate folder, then reattach them, letting them replay the logs.
So my question is...is this a problem? I would think that without doing a clean detach, the reattach process isn't really a guaranteed success in all cases (System DB's, User DB's, etc.) Should my recommendation be to do the SQL Backups regardless? I think yes but would love to hear from anyone that has had a similar experience or at least knows what happens behind the scenes when we use this methodology instead of backup/restore for every scenario.
Thanks! 😀
Oh, and we utilize 2000, 2005 and 2008(R2) in the environment.
Owner & Principal SQL Server Consultant
Im Your DBA, Inc.
https://www.imyourdba.com/
April 8, 2011 at 3:56 pm
If your databases are in the FULL recovery mode, and you have done at least one full backup, your log files would grow and grow and grow until the disk was full if you don't do a transaction log backup that is integrated with SQL Server so it knows it can inactivate VLF(s) in the log file.
It would, also, make point in time recoveries very difficult, if they are even possible.
Personally I don't like the sound of it.
You could always try it on one server where you simulate various events and then try to recover from them with your disk based backups and see how it really goes.
April 11, 2011 at 1:30 pm
UMG Developer (4/8/2011)
If your databases are in the FULL recovery mode, and you have done at least one full backup, your log files would grow and grow and grow until the disk was full if you don't do a transaction log backup that is integrated with SQL Server so it knows it can inactivate VLF(s) in the log file.It would, also, make point in time recoveries very difficult, if they are even possible.
Personally I don't like the sound of it.
You could always try it on one server where you simulate various events and then try to recover from them with your disk based backups and see how it really goes.
Yeah, the interesting thing about our environment is that currently there are no requirements for FULL recovery mode. Everything is running SIMPLE and would restore from the previous nights backup. I took over this environment (300+ SQL Servers) about three months ago and will be doing a review/audit of this methodology soon.
Owner & Principal SQL Server Consultant
Im Your DBA, Inc.
https://www.imyourdba.com/
April 11, 2011 at 2:05 pm
SQLJocky (4/8/2011)
has now moved to Avamar (disk based backup solution) for our backup and partial DR strategy.
i'm guessing this interfaces with VCB and snapshots the VM's virtual disks!
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