Avoiding an Oracle hot backup

[goodmantc]

I have a server running Oracle that is primarily supported by a vendor. They currently do a scripted cold backup. I also have been having Veeam doing a hot backup as well. I think at times when a backup window gets skewed it will attempt to hot backup the database when they have it offline and it will actually prevent their process form restarting the required services to put the database back online. They also state their Oracle licensing does not allow a hot backup. So in short they have asked us to stop the hot backup. My questions is if I just tell Veeam to skip the volume with the Oracle database on it, will it stop trying to put Oracle in hot backup mode? I hate to stop backing up the other volumes on the box as it has tons of other installed apps and processes which would take forever to set back up on that box is something happened to it.

Thank You,
Thomas Goodman

[michaelryancook]

Hi Thomas. I am not a pro with Oracle backups yet but my understanding based on reading within the forum and testing with our local DBA is that the "Enable application-aware processing" checkbox on the "Guest Processing" portion of the backup job is what enables Oracle hot-backup mode. You should be able to disable by removing the checkmark on that job or disabling it for the single VM by clicking the "Applications" button and modifying the individual VM settings.

[goodmantc]

I'm going to do just that for tonight's backup. Thank you for the suggestion. Is there anything else I may loose on the O/S level by disabling this or is the application aware processing pretty much only for databases and such?

[veremin]

Disabling AAIP might do the trick, indeed.

In general, it's recommended to backup Windows-based machines with AAIP enabled, as it freezes activity inside the guest prior to creating a snapshot. Without AAIP the data in the backup would be in a “crash-consistent” state, it is the same as it would be after a system failure or power outage.

Thanks.

[michaelryancook]

Hi Thomas. I am curious if that worked for you? We started without AAIP and tested our Oracle backups by using a SureBackup job that left the VMs running. Oracle is quite good with recovering from crash and all of our tests without AAIP were successful. Since then we have enabled and tested with AAIP. Again using the same SureBackup job and all of our tests with AAIP were also successful. We are trying to reduce disk requirements by using AAIP rather than the Oracle RMAN backups our DBAs currently use but it's a tough sell.

[veremin]

Michael,

Kindly, be aware that even with AAIP enabled, RMAN might still be required for point-in-time recovery, logs replay, etc.

Thanks.

[michaelryancook]

Good point. Thanks Vladimir.