Veeam Plug-in for Microsoft SQL Server - what do you think?

[johannesk]

Hi,

I'm looking into the new feature in V12 to be able to have an plugin on SQL servers that makes it possible to let the VBR repository be accessible as a VDI from SQL Server Studio.

I see some obvious benefit of this, the DBA's can now manage the backups and now it's possible to backup a single db without backing up the whole vm. You get verification options during the backup and some granularity regarding filegroups.

I for one really like how SQL server backup/restore works with the image backups, the granularity of restores is really good and fast, and Full backups are quick because of CBT.

Those that are using SQL server plugin:
1) You then have another image level backup that skips doing SQL backup? or can you combine the to methods?

2) Did this resolve an issue you've had with backing up SQL server with VBR image backup?

Regards,
Jóhannes

[PetrM]

Hi Johannes,

1) I think the easiest way is to enable Copy-only mode in either image-level job or in SQL plug-in one (the bottom checkbox). The copy-only mode does not change the log sequence number and transaction log backup time to not break a DB backup chain which is handled by another backup solution.

2) If you're talking about VSS-related problems on highly loaded SQL servers with a huge amount of DBs running, then it is solved because the plug-in produces consistent backups without leveraging the VSS framework. Moreover, the plug-in may provide faster data processing during backups and restores and handles up to 2 000 DBs per server or cluster. Transaction log backups can be also offloaded or copied to the Capacity Tier.

Thanks!