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antman157
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Multiple SQL Servers backed up using Veeam

Post by antman157 »

Hello,

We currently have 3 SQL servers in production. What is the best practice to back these 3 servers up? By using individual jobs or as a group? Right now I have them grouped and they will kick the first job off tonight. My concern is if I have to restore one of the servers I will have to wait for all 3 jobs to import, correct? I've turned VSS on and they will do a transform on Saturday night's. Using reverse incremental each night. Currently I have these VMs in random jobs and I am trying to group them by function. My only fear is the time it would take to restore 1 of them if it was needed.

How do you handle multiple SQL servers?

Data:
Size of VMs
1) 1.2TB
2) 750 GB
3) 47GB (Mirror)

OS version
2008R2 / SQL 2008
2012R2 / SQL 2012
foggy
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Re: Multiple SQL Servers backed up using Veeam

Post by foggy »

antman157 wrote:My only fear is the time it would take to restore 1 of them if it was needed.
Time required for restore doesn't depend much on the number of VMs in the job.
antman157
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Re: Multiple SQL Servers backed up using Veeam

Post by antman157 »

It would just take longer for Veeam to read the tape and information correct? Because I would just be restoring the 1 VM
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Re: Multiple SQL Servers backed up using Veeam

Post by foggy »

Ok, you didn't mention tape in your original post. ;) However, even in this case, you can use direct restore to infrastructure, which eliminates the effect of large backup files.
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Re: Multiple SQL Servers backed up using Veeam

Post by Gostev »

If you mean restoring directly from tape, then Veeam will only read the required information (data blocks belonging to the restored VM).
antman157
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Re: Multiple SQL Servers backed up using Veeam

Post by antman157 »

Oops, I apologize. Our setup copies the backup to tape -- Tape is sent offsite -- Then at DR, tape is imported to the repository in DR then the restore is brought into VMware.
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Re: Multiple SQL Servers backed up using Veeam

Post by skrause »

If you use reverse incremental it will keep your snapshots open longer while it does the nightly transforms of the full backup file so you will have a higher likelihood of snapshot removal stuns causing connections to the DB to be interrupted temporarily. That would be a bigger concern for me than the amount of time to do a restore from tape, especially considering the size of the VMs.
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antman157
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Re: Multiple SQL Servers backed up using Veeam

Post by antman157 »

How do you do your SQL incremental backups? Just curious if there's a better way and a reverse.
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Re: Multiple SQL Servers backed up using Veeam

Post by skrause »

For stand alone SQL boxes, I just do a standard forward incremental job. If you are concerned about disk space on the repository you can always do Forever incremental or transform previous chains to rollbacks. Either way, you can set up your tape job in such a way as to create a synthesized VBK for your "oh shit" moment when you have to restore from offline media. I do copy only on application aware for all of our SQL servers because we have a DBAs who do individual database backups/restores.

My "production" setup is considerably more intricate than most people's setups. We use a 3-headed always-on availability group for our production SQL boxes (2 synchronous with automatic failover in primary datacenter and 1 asynchronous in failover DC 150 miles away connected via a 10GB link). The two synchronous replicas are backed up in separate jobs which are chained to avoid both getting a snapshot stun at the same time which would make the core applications that use databases on those servers inaccessible for more than the momentary blip that happens when the AlwaysOn fails over.
Steve Krause
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