vmware snapshot vs application aware veeam backup

[johannesk]

hi,

I'm wondering about which is better, vmware snapshot taken by hand in vcenter or a vmware snapshot that is initiated and backed application aware by veeam. And administrator might want to insure himself before doing a change on a vm.

In by far most cases the time it takes to revert to earlier point in time by veeam backup only takes a few minutes in our environment. Doing the same with just vmware snaphost will probably safe you those few minutes.

Is there anything else than the time to do the revert, that makes vmware snapshot a better recovery option?

I on the other hand see the benefits of Application aware backed up snapshot being, that you don't have a vmware snapshot waiting to be deleted, and potentially stun the vm when that is done aftere the snapshot has been open for long.

What do you think?

Regards,
Jóhannes

[Mildur]

Hi Johannes

In our company, we have this policy:

- Snapshot will only be required for maximum 1-2 days:
The administrator use VmWare do create it. If you do the snapshot with Quiesce Guest File, then the vss writers inside the vm make sure, that you have a application consistent snapshot.

- Snapshot will be used longer as 2 days:
We use Quick Backup to create a snapshot/backup of the vm. A snapshot should not be open to long. We are actively monitoring the snapshots with Veeam One and remove them when they get to old.

Is there anything else than the time to do the revert, that makes vmware snapshot a better recovery option?

Reverting a vm to an older state can also be really fast with Quick Rollbackup.

[soncscy]

> In by far most cases the time it takes to revert to earlier point in time by veeam backup only takes a few minutes in our environment. Doing the same with just vmware snaphost will probably safe you those few minutes.

I strongly advise consider the non-time benefits of using quick backup -- if something goes "bad" with the VM on production at the Vmware level, snapshot or not you're out of luck. The backup does not have the same link to the production datastore.

The snapshot will __usually__ be faster, but if anything happens to it or the VM files or the datastore, everything is lost; it's not all inclusive, so if any of those go, so does the VM. With the backup, you add another layer of resilience on another device, with the ability to copy this resilience elsewhere.

Take your pick I say. Yes, the backup takes more space, but in my opinion, recovery is far more complete.

[johannesk]

Thanks Harvey and Fabian for your input.

Yes I advocate for doing the quickbackup. We have it nicely setup with a powershell script the admins can run and see the status of the process. Quick rollback is very fast.

Thus I don't really see the point in creating a snapshot in vmware. You then only have one way to make use of it with a complete rollback or delete the snapshot, whereas with a veeam backup you can do granular file restores also that might actually be useful also.

If anyone here can tell me when a vmware snapshot done ad-hoc in vcenter is better than doing quickbackup, I would be very interested to know.

Regards,
Jóhannes