MSSQL backup

[panzer]

Hi.
What are things to consider when designing backup of MSSQL-servers running on AHV? There is no transaction consistent approach like in Veeam for VMware og Hyper-V, so restoring an SQL-server will give me a corrupt database as far as I can see.

[ronnmartin61]

If Nutanix guest tools are installed on the VM they should trigger a VSS snapshot when we run our agentless AHV backup however we would encourage you to test. If you want full log grooming capabilities consider using the Veeam Windows agent.

[panzer]

NGT is running with VSS enabled on the SQL-servers. I have restored databases from different servers, and mounted them on a test server. DBCC CHECKDB runs OK on some of them, while others fail with error messages like "Table error: Object ID 0, index ID -1, partition ID 0, alloc unit ID 0 (type Unknown), page ID (1:342877) contains an incorrect page ID in its page header. The PageId in the page header = (0:0)". So now I don't know which one of my SQL restores will be corrupt. I was hoping not to have to manage backup agents for all my SQL-serveres.

[ronnmartin61]

Have you checked your setup against https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documen ... -wc-r.html? Perhaps VSS snapshots aren't being initiated by NGT for some reason.

[panzer]

I configured a Protection Group in Nutanix and enabled VSS on it, as instructed in https://portal.nutanix.com/page/documen ... -wc-r.html

It now looks like restore of a database from one server in the production group is OK. This will help me a lot. However, I am still considering using Veeam Agent on the SQL-servers to be able to configure log backup and log trunc. I really miss these functions from my Veeam/VMware system. Veeam for AHV is a bit disappointing.

[ronnmartin61]

We're continuing to work with the Nutanix data protection team to establish a facility that allows us to interact with their NGT VSS provider but right now there's no committed timeline

[Seb.pythoud]

hi @ronnmartin61
anything new on this side ?
is agentless mssql backups fully supported on AHV now ?

[ronnmartin61]

@Seb.pythoud with our new 6.0 version we will re-establish log truncate by default behavior in conjunction with NGT (Nutanix changed the default behavior to "copy" mode in AOS 6.5). While by default we will truncate, copy mode can be set if that is the desired behavior. We will have this information in the appendix of the 6.0 user guide on veeam.com.
I recognize that this is an incremental improvement at best but watch this space the next few months as we work on more fundamental improvements