Restart Windows Server VM during Backup Operation OK?

[User56]

Hello,

Customer have Vmware ESXi 6.0 essential with 5 Windows Server 2016 VMs.

He has one Veeam JOB for Backup these VMs.

It takes severall hours for the job to complete.

I think it is complete backup once a week and inkr. every day.

Is it ok to restart one or two of the Windows Server Backups during Backup operation? (I mean if the VM is not pending...if the VM Backup is e.g. at 50%)

[ejenner]

If it hasn't got to the server that you want to restart then that wouldn't be a problem.

Depends on how you have it set up, but even with the server powered off in VMware I would have thought it can still be backed up with some configuration of the backup.

You can view where in the process the job is by clicking on the machines in the job log at the lower part of the console window.

[foggy]

I'd also take a look at why it takes so long to backup just a few VMs. What is the total size of these VMs and what are the bottleneck stats for this job?

[Anders]

The only time when the VM should not be rebooting is before the VMWare snapshot is being created. After the VMWare snapshot is created on a VM, you can do whatever you like inside it.

If application awareness is activated though, for example on a SQL server, and you want it to truncate the SQL transaction logs when the job is finished, you want the VM to be running the entire time, so the VSS writer state is not affected.