Single disk snapshot - what are the affects?

[v334m]

Hi
I am backing up single disks (Which contain .bak files) of several SQL VM's... using the Exclusions functions, disks tab, and just ticking the disks we want.

I am hoping to be able to snapshot these disks during business hours, as the data written/read from these disks only happens during SQL backup window (which isnt in business hours), so in theory, during the day, this disk should not have any reads or writes.

However, will snapshotting this disk, affect the rest of the VM ie. will it pause the OS as normal snapshot operations do ? Or hopefully it just pauses the disk we are snapshotting

Looking forward to your response,

Thanks

[foggy]

Even if you exclude some disks from the job, the snapshot will still be taken against the entire VM and includes all its disks.

May I ask you why don't you want to back up the entire VM using application-aware image processing that ensures that each application state is transactionally consistent (all the transactions performed within VM are committed prior to snapshotting it)?

[v334m]

I want our dedicated SQL team to control our SQL backups, and until v8 comes out (which i believe has new fancy SQL browsers) i am not happy with v7 doing my SQL backups.
I am mainly concerned with moving the .bak files off-server and eventually to tape for long term storage, i need to be able to keep sql and vm backups seperately.
I thought by backing up the dedicated 'backup' disk on each SQL server, i would be able to accomplish this.

But what your saying is, the whole VM is snapshotted, so we cannot do this during the day on production SQL servers? Running out of time to snapshot and move all my SQL backups over night

[Vitaliy S.]

If you don't want to snapshot particular disks or back them up, you can configure them as independent. This will automatically exclude these disks from snapshots.

[v334m]

Aye, but that doesnt help my OS level backups.
Will have to think of a better way of shipping .bak files without using snapshots.....