Backup Lotus Notes Servers with Veeam

[GBSB]

We are in the process of setting up (p2v conversion) of Lotus Notes servers onto VMWare and intend using Veeam as a backup solution.
For the backup we have the following situation
It appears that Lotus Notes does not support VSS, the first 2 servers are only used 8 - 5 (ish) so I suppose stopping the domino service before the backup and restarting after the backup would be an option ?.
What other workable options do we have.
1 Server is W2K so no VSS support anyway, the other is 2003 Server.

The conversions are interim solutions, but we want to get off the existing hardware ASAP, long term we will probably use other backups for Lotus Notes, but who know what solutions are round the corner in 3 - 6 months.

I did search the forum and information was a bit thin, and what was there was 2 years old plus and I know time moves on.

Many thanks for any advice.

[Vitaliy S.]

I believe nothing has changed in regards suggested methods of backing up Lotus Notes Servers. So stopping service with pre-freeze scripts should be an option for you.

[GBSB]

Many thanks Vitaliy for the prompt reply. I searched for Lotus Notes not Domino.
How long should we expect the snapshot to take from freezing to thawing, I suppose the size is the decider really.
Any guestimates on say 500 GB, 700 gb, 900 gb size machines these are the present sizes on disk on a physical box which is being converted.

[Vitaliy S.]

Well...I'm not sure what you mean, or how it relates to the topic

Basically, all you need here is to use pre-freeze script that will stop Domino service and as soon as snapshot is created will start it again. Snapshot creation procedure is really quick, so you won't have that much downtime no matter what is the size of the guest disk.

What you were referring to relates to snapshot consolidation which depends on the size of the VM changes written to this snapshot file. Snapshot commit operation is not that fast, but it shouldn't be a problem for your Domino server.

[GBSB]

Hi Vitaliy, should have updated and closed this before, sorry for the delay.
We are now getting to better understand the principles behind VM, snapshots etc so many of the posts on the site are making more and more sense.
We used the Freeze and thaw method as described and has worked fine for us, many thanks for your help.

[bororo]

[merged]

Any "best practise" or experience for backing up Lotus Notes on CentOS in "application consistent" state?