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VSphere incremental SQL backup

MarvinFS
Level 3

Dear collegues,

I'm testing a vmware vsphere 5.1 HA cluster backup with about 20 VMs

the backup schedule for ALL vm's on Vcenter backup job is mon-thu - incremental, fri-full.

Also i've got some SQL servers among those VMs, so i've enabled GRT option for SQL DBs during VM backups.

The question is, how i can get a consistent SQL DB restore for a wednesday, for example, in this backup scenario, keeping in mind that on wendesday i had an incremental only backup.  (all the DBs are in simple recovery mode)

 

Sincerely,

MarvinFS

3 REPLIES 3

pkh
Moderator
Moderator
   VIP    Certified

Even when you specify incremental, the SQL databases will still be backed up as full when you backup the VM.  If you want incremental backups for your SQL databases, then you got to back them up using the SQL agent.

MarvinFS
Level 3

Oh is it true? then i need to keep in mind the space considerations for everyday full SQL backup's anyway...

In that case what does the incremental backup of VM means? i mean it's still a full snapshot of VM including everything?!

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

An incremental backup of a VM looks at change block tracking to identify what has changed on the file system of the VM however does not really look inside of SQL. Also the VSS operation to quiesce SQL does this as a full operation and the VMware backup is then seen as a full backup of SQL

BTW for information if you did want to run incremental (transaction log) SQL backups, then not only would you have to switch to traditional agent based backups, BUT your SQL databases cannot be using the SImple Recovery model.