VSS

[jgeuder]

Hello,

I am just about to start evaluating Veeam ‘Backup and Replication’… and have one question.
When using the VSS option in Veeam – is this activating the “built-in” VMware VSS service that is installed with the VMware Tools or is this a proprietary service from Veeam?

Thank you very much!

-Jason

[tsightler]

This is a Veeam proprietary service that offers a much more complete VSS implementation than the VMware VSS service. While the "built-in" VMware VSS is a minimal VSS implementation, the Veeam VSS provides full support for restores of VSS aware features/applications like Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, etc.

[Gostev]

Tom is correct.

Additionally, VMware VSS only supports application-level quiescence for Windows 2003. For Windows Vista and Windows 2008, VSS application writers are not leveraged, so only file-system level freeze is performed (applications are not quiesced). Other operating systems are not supported.

Veeam VSS provides full (application-level) quiescence support for all VSS-aware Windows operating systems:
• Windows XP (32-bit only)
• Windows 2003
• Windows Vista
• Windows 2008
• Windows 2008 R2
• Windows 7

[antivir]

What is the full list when i need to enable VSS? Does it support Oracle and FoxPro?

[Fatih]

And how does Veeam VSS option effect Linux VM's ? Is it being used or skipped ?

[Vitaliy S.]

Andrew,

Actually, if your application supports VSS option, then you should definitely use it. As for FoxPro please have a look at David's answer for that: Foxpro Database, and here is the thread for Oracle: How to backup Oracle

Thank you

[Vitaliy S.]

Fatih,

Veeam VSS is used only for Windows machines, for Linux you may either use just VMware Tools Quiescence option or VMware Tools Quiescence + pre-freeze scripts. You may do some search at our forums for more information about that, there are multiple treads discussing both how to backup Linux and Windows VMs.

Thank you