Veeam, Snapshots, Quiesce, and MS SQL

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KapsZ28

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It seems like some of these issues are from older of ESX/ESXi, but wanted to confirm. We will be using the latest version of Veeam Backup & Replication with vSphere 5.5 U1 to do backups. I spoke with an Engineer from another company that said they also using Veeam except for any VMs running SQL. For SQL, they use ShadowProtect instead. The reason being is that when using Veeam, SQL tends to lock up.

From what I can see, there are a couple of reason a VM may lock up during the snapshot or snapshot removal. One is from using quiesce during the snapshot. But with Veeam we have the option to enable application-aware image processing which basically uses Microsoft VSS instead. Same way ShadowProtect works to my knowledge. So with that enable, the SQL transactions should be processed and I would think it should cause the DB to lock up.

The other issue I have seen is when removing a snapshot that a VM freezes and Veeam uses snapshots for its backups. But this appeared to be an issue prior to vSphere 5.0.

So my question is, are there still issues with using Veeam to backup SQL databases during production hours?
 
Shouldn't be with any backup software unless your database is whacky or you haev storage / other problems.
 
Not sure I agree with that. I have definitely heard about backups that cause locks in SQL.
 
It seems that the most common issue is when the VMware snapshot is removed. This requires the deltas to be written to the vmdk file. I'm guessing this is probably only an issue if there are disk performance problems that cause some latency while the deltas are being written.
 
If you have a large quantity transaction intensive batabase vss is not enough to prevent db availability impact. We've found hardware snaps combined with regular local backups of maintenance plan performed SQL db backups work when we don't have a true backup agent or a mirror we can perform backups against.
But were talking thousand transactions a second. Hundreds a minute are fine with veeam.
 
We've had these issues with a SQL servers and veeam. I'm not sure if it's caused lockups but definitely performance issues while removing snapshots. Not only that but a snapshot removal can go on for hours on a SQL server causing the backup job to take forever.

We just switched all SQL severs to do normal SQL backups. We restore databases if needed.
 
Holy crap. Never had that issue. Hundreds of SQL servers. Various backup products.
What are your hard numbers for transactions, changed data?
I'm assuming you have dedicated volumes for data types?
 
0V3RC10CK3D said:
We've had these issues with a SQL servers and veeam. I'm not sure if it's caused lockups but definitely performance issues while removing snapshots. Not only that but a snapshot removal can go on for hours on a SQL server causing the backup job to take forever.

We just switched all SQL severs to do normal SQL backups. We restore databases if needed.
Click to expand...

That's not veeam, that's just the snapshot system
 
I have issues with veeam backing up my vcenter sql server all the time. Its the only SQL server I have that is a problem.
 
I just recently had issues with my remote office SQL servers, NFS and Veeam. I would lose connectivity during snapshot removal from time to time for a few seconds. The storage unit isn't the fastest in the world so the answer was to put the Veeam proxy in NBD and make sure it's on the same host as the SQL server. Issues gone.
 
I think we are just going to have SQL do the backups during the day and we will use Veeam at night without VSS. This is a Great Plains DB, so we don't want the client to have issues when they are doing their accounting.
 
QHalo said:
I just recently had issues with my remote office SQL servers, NFS and Veeam. I would lose connectivity during snapshot removal from time to time for a few seconds. The storage unit isn't the fastest in the world so the answer was to put the Veeam proxy in NBD and make sure it's on the same host as the SQL server. Issues gone.
Click to expand...


That actually brings up a question. We are building a new Windows Server for storing Veeam backups. This server is going to be in a different datacenter. Someone mentioned installing Veeam on the backup server and have it pull the data from other datacenters to the backup server. My idea was to install Veeam at each datacenter and push the backups to the offsite location. Possibly even using the WAN accelerator.

Is there a preferred way of doing this?
 
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