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Backup of vm with oracle database

P40l0
Level 3

Hi all,

I acutally backup a virtual server with on-board Oracle database using virtual-based backups. I also carried out some restore tests of the complete VM and the oracle DB always turned out to be intact. In other words, all, the Oracle DB and the o.s. seem ok after the restore of the complete VM. But at the following link I read that it is not recommended to use the virtual-based backup with Oracle. What risks could I run into?
I'm not interested in the GRT for Oracle, but only the restore of the complete VM, the Oracle Windows server.

https://www.veritas.com/content/support/en_US/doc/59226269-99535599-0/v109940109-99535599

p.s. apologize for my bad English

 

4 REPLIES 4

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Probably more of a question for Oracle (especially as I think some time ago they used to document  that VM backups were not recommended which I I suspect where our information originally came from) In terms of us still saying not recommended - we don't do any official testing to confirm if there could be any issues, hence we still state not recommended as we don't test

Basically we cannot guarantee how consistent the database is against the snapshot of the VM, if Oracle is fully VSS aware when running on Windows (as we do make a VSS request inside the VM when doing a VM backup) then it maybe the database is frozen in a consistent way and no issues. However if not fully VSS aware, your restore could end up in what is sometimes called a Crash Consistent state which is loosely similar to what might happen if the power is removed from  your server down whilst Oracle is running, where some of the time it will come backup with no issues, but every once in a while consistency is lost and problems occur.

Hi,

 

excuse me for the delay(a lot of trouble in these days).

From the DR tests carried out to date post-restore, the Oracle DB was consistent (checked by Oracle DBAs).

In addition, we also have the rman backup saved on a disk of the same VM. The entire VM(all disks) is saved at a time after the completion of the rman disk backup.

Could it be an idea to turn off the VM with Oracle and then make a sort of offline backup of the VM?  Provided that I can make a backup of the powered off VM with Backup Exec 15, I have to check

 

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

If Oracle say it was coinsistent then I guess OK to do it, but that does not change our recommendation at this current time, and therefore, how you decide to continue will have to be at your own risk

 

That said if you dump to file using RMAN as well then I doubt you need to turn off the VM as even if consistency is an issue - the dump to file will be consistent and within the online VM backup

I save the file dump too, so I be sure that I can restore the DB if something goes wrong during the restore of the entire VM , as you also said. Murphy's law is always in ambush!