any reason to shutdown guest before backup

[jjvierra]

Sorry if this is a basic question. I'm new to Veeam. Do the guests have to support snapshot? I have a couple of guests that don't support snapshots while running. If I shut them down then I can snapshot them. I wanted to see if there is ever a reason to have to shutdown a guest before backing it up.

[skrause]

Why don't your guests support snapshots?

Veeam has to be able to snapshot the machines to run a backup. I am sure you could snapshot a shut down VM and have it back up. You would run into errors if you tried to run application aware image processing against a shut down VM.

[jjvierra]

It's something to do with an active database. I will continue to shut them down.

Thanks

[foggy]

What kind of database it is? It's quite typical to stop the database prior backup using pre-freeze script, if it cannot be quiesced natively via VSS.

[PTide]

Hi,

It's something to do with an active database. I will continue to shut them down.

Databases typically have some internal mechanisms that allow you to perform transactional-consistent backups without stopping the database. As foggy's already pointed, those mechanisms can be triggered via pre-job script.

However, if you are OK with crash-consistent backup then you don't have to shutdown the VM prior to backup.

Thank you.