Veeam Backup & Replication questions

[ashm]

Hi,

I'm currently testing Veeam Backup & Replication. We are using ESXi4 free, but we are planning to purchase vSphere essentials with either Veeam Backup & Replication or the Veeam Essentials suite.

We have a mix of Linux and Windows VMs.

I was wondering if there is currently or will be an option in Veeam Backup to shutdown a VM, then take a snapshot + power up the VM again. We have a few VMs where a small amount of downtime in the middle of the night would not be an issue.

We have a linux VM running Zimbra email software. Would the best way to back up this VM be to run a custom pre & post snapshot script to stop the Zimbra services, take the snapshot and then restart the Zimbra services? I've been testing the use of these scripts and they work as I want, but only seem to work if VMware Tools quiescence option is checked which I've read is not the best option as it can result in data corruption in some cases?

I then have a Windows Server 2003 VM that is running MySQL & PostgreSQL. I've tested using a pre & post snapshot script for stopping and starting the databases but again they only seem to work if VMware Tools quiescence option is checked and the VSS option is disabled. I was hoping that the scripts would still run with the VSS option enabled as this is recommended for Windows VMs.

For the above two cases, would it be best to disable the VMware sync driver?

Thanks

[Gostev]

Hi, yes pre/post scripts is the way to go. VMware sync driver only causes issues on live (running) applications and databases, but since you will your pre script to suspend your applications, there is nothing to worry about.

v5 releasing this week will allow settings VSS options granularly on per-VM basis, so you will be able to use both our VSS and VMware Tools quiescence within the same job.

Thanks!