Comprehensive data protection for all workloads
Post Reply
gingerdazza
Expert
Posts: 191
Liked: 14 times
Joined: Jul 23, 2013 9:14 am
Full Name: Dazza
Contact:

VSS Snapshots

Post by gingerdazza »

I'm interested to hear what everyone's strategy is when it comes to doing VSS backups, specifically whether most people always enable VSS based backup on Windows VMs, or whether they pick and choose the VMs on which they do VSS backup (i.e. AD, SQL, Exchange, etc.)? Why would you choose NOT to do VSS aware backup on a windows VM? Stun?

Would welcome people's thoughts.

Thanks
nmdange
Veteran
Posts: 527
Liked: 142 times
Joined: Aug 20, 2015 9:30 pm
Contact:

Re: VSS Snapshots

Post by nmdange » 1 person likes this post

Disclaimer: my environment is Hyper-V not VMWare so I don't know if "Stun" is a big issue with VMWare that doesn't occur in Hyper-V.

I always enable VSS for everything, even for VMs besides AD/SQL/Exchange, you still need VSS to ensure a file-system consistent backup. The only time I have ever disabled it is in the case where a VM's VSS is broken and the backups are failing with a VSS error. I'll switch to crash-consistent temporarily just to get something.
DeadEyedJacks
Veeam ProPartner
Posts: 141
Liked: 26 times
Joined: Oct 12, 2015 2:55 pm
Full Name: Dead-Data
Location: UK
Contact:

Re: VSS Snapshots

Post by DeadEyedJacks » 1 person likes this post

Not all Windows applications are VSS aware.
Some will crash when a VSS snapshot of the VM is taken, others just don't quiesce and won't be transactional consistent.
We have two such applications out of a catalogue of five hundred applications.
Know your service catalogue and test the outliers outside production environment.
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Amazon [Bot], Google [Bot] and 157 guests