Foxpro Database

[KJ845]

Is anyone backing up or replicating a VM that is running a Dos and Visual FoxPro database?

If so have you restored it success fully?
Did you have to do any special configuration to have this work?
Are you replication this server?

[Veeam-dsiles]

Kurt,

I am not personally aware of any customers that running the configuration you mentioned above, but I am sure you are concerned with making sure your database is backed up with application consistency. Obviously our version of VSS and VMware Tools Quiescence don't provide integrated functionality for a DOS environment, so you really have three options to making sure your backup is application consistent for backup.

1.) You can run a scheduled process inside your operating environment to produce a maintenance backup locally that would be archived as part of the full VM backup.

2.) Create a plan to shut down the database inside the VM before the scheduled backup time so that transactions are flushed to disk before the backup. Then relaunch the Foxpro DB (I couldn't find any documentation on a way to do this, may not exist. Been a long time since I dealt with Foxpro for DOS)

3.) Create a schedule task in vCenter or use the PowerCLI toolkit to make a call to VirtualCenter to shut down the VM. VMware doesn't provide guest shutdown functionality, but the VM will be in a powered off state with no data transactions taking place. You can run your Veeam backup and then as part of the completion of our job you can call another PowerCLI action to restart the VM or have a scheduled task timed to restart the VM after the backup process is complete.

Hope these ideas help and maybe we will have another user who is doing something like your scenario as well who can share some experiences.

Dave