Active Full During Production?

[rm4g00]

Hello all,

Does anyone know any issues in an active full backup during production hours? our main file servers & mail servers took much longer to complete active full's than normal this week so now they are still completing holding up the chain...

Other than the expected performance issues would there be any pitfalls/major issues in office hours?

Thanks

[dellock6]

Hi,
it depends on the hardware you have for your production storage, some may have a huge decrease in performance, some would have a lot less. Classic vmware snapshots have indeed some performance impact regardless the storage in use, because of the I/O redirection that is used there. There's not to much that can be done to this technology, but some workarounds can be applied:
- the quickest one is to switch from active full to synthetics, so that your weekly fulls take the same time of an incremental
- upgrade to vsphere 6 plus patches to limit the impact of snapshot consolidation (http://www.virtualtothecore.com/en/vsph ... hing-past/)
- again with vsphere 6, look at VVOLs if your storage supports them, as the snapshot technology is totally different and has no performance impact
- if you have a supported storage, use Veeam backups from storage snapshot, as the vm snapshot is removed after a few seconds from the beginning of the job, not at the end, so it doens't matter how long it takes for the backup to complete

Luca

[rm4g00]

Thanks mate- vsphere 6 is in the pipeline - synthetics is what we have been thinking of implementing then just a normal active full monthly.

[rm4g00]

Would you recommend a synthetic full every week then an active full last sunday of the month - just incase?

[veremin]

Sounds like a good idea, indeed. Also, running periodic Surebackup Jobs would not harm. Thanks.