Backup Recommendations

[VMNewbie]

I'm running Veeam Backup on a standalone host and will be writing the backups to local storage. We have (2) Vsphere 4.1 ESXi hosts in an HA cluster. Our vCenter server is a VM running on one of the hosts. We also have a SQL server running as a VM that contains our vCenter database as well as our Veeam databases. Our ESXi hosts are using local storage for the ESXi operating systems but all of our VM's are on a SAN. I've read in a couple other posts that in order to have a transactionally consistent backup of the SQL database, then I should be backing up directly through the host. I gather I can use the Direct SAN access mode for the bulk of our VM's but I'm unsure of the best practice for backing up our vCenter server and our SQL database.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Jeffrey,

I've read in a couple other posts that in order to have a transactionally consistent backup of the SQL database, then I should be backing up directly through the host.

If you're talking about regular SQL Server VMs (not hosting vCenter Server's database), then all you need is just make sure you've enabled "Application-aware image processing", in this case all your backups will be transaction-consistent.

Provided that you're backing up vCenter Server, then you should be following these inctructions: Backing up virtual center VM

However, if you have vCenter Server and its database on separate VMs, then I believe you will need to use that workaround in both cases.

Thank you!