Backup of big MS SQL database

[rfn]

Hi,

We have a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 server with a database that is 13 TB. That's a big database and the reason is that it contains millions of PDF files. This is not really practical and all new PDF files are placed in the file system with links in the database, but all the historic data is still in there.

The server is hosted by a provider and they urge us to extract these files and shrink the database, but that has proven problematic for our developers so I have asked the hosting provider is they could backup the database with Veeam and keep it big. Their reply is that Veeam backup can't handle databases of this size. Is that true? Will it be problematic to create backups of this database without getting timeouts when snapshots are committed?

The server is a VM on vSphere and the storage is HP StoreVirtual P4000.

Regards,
René Frej Nielsen

[dellock6]

If they have the enteprise plus license for Veeam Backup & replication, they can use storage snapshots since the StoreVirtual is one of the supported storage arrays, so the final commit of the vm snapshot would be much much easier. I can't give you numbers as the real load also depends on how much that array is loaded also by other VMs, but for sure the commit phase will not be a problem as it's done even before the real backup begins.

Luca

[rfn]

The physical host is only running this one VM and the SAN is dedicated for this solution. The IO requirement is pretty low and most is read. This is an archive solution and there is only new data comming in 2-3 times a month. This means that most days there will be none (or very few) changes on the server and a few times it will have 3-500 GB of new data. These new data will be PDF files is the file system and a little bit of data in the SQL Server.

I don't know what license they're using for the server.

[alexander sh]

A couple of questions seem relevant here:

1) Have the provider actually tested and verified that backing up this SQL server with Veeam does indeed cause timeouts during snapshot commit? It could be the case that full backup causes timeouts, but incrementals do not - in which case you're probably are going to be good with forever incremental.
2) Is this DB a part of a 24/7 service or application? If not, you may be able to schedule the backup in a way that doesn't affect the application users.

[rfn]

1) No they haven't tested it. Their "backup team" just claims that it won't work. It was me who guessed that the issue would be timeouts because of the big disks, but since it's quite unlikely that they will be ANY changed data while the backup is running, then I really don't see the issue. If it was my environment, then i wouldn't have expected problems.

2) Yes... this needs to be running 24/7 with no interruption, except for scheduled maintenance like patching. If it were to have a timeout during night time, then I wouldn't expect any real problems though.

[alexander sh]

Well, honestly I don't really see how they can claim that it can't be done if they haven't tested it, sounds somewhat strange. If you could push them into testing, we would definitely be glad to help if any issues arise.