Veeam SAP Hana PlugIn Long Term Backup possibilities

[miingno]

Hello!

I was wondering if there is anyone out there who might have encountered SAP HANA backup already. We are trying for months now to get a backup up and running with veeam but always fail at some point.

According to the white paper for SAP HANA Backup (https://www.veeam.com/wp-veeam-sap-hana ... e-v19.html) there are three different solutions we could use. All of them however have at least one issue that we run into:

Agent Backup
We do not own any Linux Agent Licenses and the company is not willing to buy any. So this solution isn't possible from the get go and also clashes with the problems we have with the VM Snapshot and Script Solution...

VM Snapshots with Scripts
Our SAP HANA should never stop. The scripts however freeze and unfreeze the database for the backup and this is not a possible solution.

Backup with backing PlugIn
The best solution in our eyes, at least concerning the database and log files.
This solution however does not allow any long term and off site backup possibility. The files this plug-in creates all have the same extension and the backup job cannot have any follow-up jobs in veeam. We are unable to touch these files and thus we cannot make any backup copy or tape copy jobs using veeam.
Also handling these files is only possible in the SAP HANA studio manually for each file. Removing older backups either has to be done individually for each file or from a single point backwards. As there is no differentiation between log and full backups, this would not allow to keep for example the last two weekly full backups as it will delete everything if I were to delete everything older than one day.

Does anyone else have experience with this or might be able to point to something we didn't see?
Could veeam v10 maybe solve our conundrum?!

Thank you very much!

[Andreas Neufert]

Hello Andy,

thanks for the request. Please have a look at this one.
https://www.veeam.com/blog/sap-hana-ten ... overy.html

We can as well discuss with our specialists if you have further questions.

[miingno]

Hello Andreas,

Thank you very much for the link to the blogpost. I had already briefly skimmed through this when it was released and thought it was impossible to do with our retention policy. After reading it again, I am 100% certain, that it's impossible to make so many manual steps for just a single backup. There just has to be a way to make it work automatically or my job title will have to change to "SAP S/4 HANA Backup Cleaner 24/7".

I guess Veeam v10 sadly won't include a better backup option then.

[Andreas Neufert]

There is as well the option to backup to a file destination (you can schedule this with Cockpit) and then back this up automatically with our file agent. There you have all the options to go long term.

[Andreas Neufert]

Your are right regarding v10, our Backup Copy Job will give you a separate retention for the whole backup chain, but no GFS processing. The issue with the Plug-in is that we are not aware of the backup process itself. The backup orchestration with included GFS processing is a feature request for a later version.

[clemens.zerbe]

Hi,
there are some ways around your challenges...
Would be great if you can sent me a mail with all your requirements on retention and when what should be moved to where.

We have plenty customers with the same kind of questions - but in most cases with very different requirements & solutions in the end. So there is no one fits all approach...sometimes you can built something out of the box...sometimes it involves some scripting to automate requirements but happy to help anyway.

If you are interested we can also place your requirements and solution here after we designed it together.

[miingno]

Hello,
We managed to get a meeting for a webinar tomorrow with a Veeam System Engineer from Veeam Switzerland. After this we might will have our answers what's possible and what not in our current situation.
I'll update once the webinar took place.

Thank you all for your support!