I'm dealing with a 3 different customers who are in the process of migrating all their production Windows boxen to VMWare.
They are using VM-centric backup products (VEEAM, VDR, and VRanger) to do the backups of their Windows systems at the .vmdk level. The VM backup products back up to disk, TSM backs up that repository and copies to tape for vaulting. These products do file-level as well as full backups for the VM's so the individual TSM baclient backups of the C: drive are being phased out, as the systems move to VMWARE. So now I'm confused as to when we need TDP for SQL backups. (From here on I'll just refer to VEEAM, but I think all the issues/questions are the same for VRanger and VDR.) My understanding from talking to VEEAM, is that if 1) the data base on the VM is VSS-enabled (MSSQL is) and 2) the data base & logs are part of the .vmdk file (common for small MSSQL dbs, uncommon for big or clustered MSSQL DB's which are usually out in the SAN) and 3) the backup software has VSS support (VEEAM does) Then when you do a backup with VEEAM, you DO get a transactionally consistent, stable and usable copy of the DB in the VEEAM/VDR backup. So if you reload your VM from the VEAAM backup, locally or at DR, you get a working SQL back (along with its logs), and you don't have to use the TDP to restore and roll forward. So, assuming that conditions 1,2, and 3 are met, are there cases we still need to use the TDP for SQL? (Now I realize that many large production DB's are out on a SAN and not part of a .vmdk so condition 2 is not met. But 90% of the MSSQL DB's I run into are small, on local disk, and get installed as part of some purchased application and nobody ever does more than a full backup of them anyway --they breed at night and pop up everywhere). How say you all? Wanda Prather | Systems Integration Specialist | [email protected] | www.jasi.com ICF Jacob & Sundstrom | 401 E. Pratt St, Suite 2214, Baltimore, MD 21202 | 410.539.1135
