SQL Server Backup Best Practices

[wa15]

Hello,

Just wondering if there are any best practices as far as backing up SQL servers using Veeam is concerned. I came across the document below and it offered some good advice, but what I am looking for is would it be okay to perform a backup/snapshot of a SQL Server every hour or every two hours? This is a fairly busy SQL server and runs on a fast array that can push out 30K IOPS but I am a bit concerned about having a snapshot of this server kick off every hour.

Any thoughts/suggestions are welcome.

www.veeam.com/ebook_top10_eric_siebert_wp.pdf

[Shestakov]

Hello Farshid,

Just wondering if there are any best practices as far as backing up SQL servers using Veeam is concerned.

Here were some topics with the similar discussion. One, two. Please review.
For transaction consistency purposes make sure Application-Aware Image Processing is enabled.

...would it be okay to perform a backup/snapshot of a SQL Server every hour or every two hours?

It depends on your capabilities. What type of storage do you have?
Thank you.

[wa15]

Thanks, the VM is on a Nimble array, and 2 of the virtual disks the VM has are vRDMs and the other two are VMDKs. The Nimble array is very much able to push the IOPS and throughput (10Gb) so we are not limited by the storage array. Just the thought of having to snapshot a VM every hour seems a little...uncomfortable? But we do need this backed up frequently, it's just that we are currently doing hourly backups using an in-guest backup method (commvault) and are looking to switch to image level backups/veeam.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Farshid,

If you search these forums, then you will see that we do have existing customers that replicate their SQL Server/Exchange VMs every hour, or even more often. If your source storage has enough horse power in terms of IOPS, then you should not have any issues during snapshot commit operation. Especially considering that hourly backups will complete very fast, and VM snapshot will not stay open for too long, so it will not get a chance to grow large, which is normally the primary cause of snapshot commit issues.

Thanks!

[wa15]

Thanks Vitaliy!