Netbackup VMware VMDK backups showing in SQL backup history - why?

[A_J_A]

I am using the native SQL Server backup procedures to back up all databases to a network share. In addition to this, we run Netbackup VMware VMDK backups on the full machines. In the Netbackup policy, the "SQL Server Recovery" option is NOT enabled. However, when this policy runs, records get inserted into the SQL backup history tables (msdb.dbo.backupset  and  msdb.dbo.backupmediafamily). This doesn't seem right to me. Why is a SQL Server level backup being initiated by Netbackup if the SQL Server application-level protection is not selected? Shouldn't this backup be completely transparent to SQL Server since it is effective a disk backup?

Here's a screenshot showing the Netbackup policy configuration

Below is the backup history as reported by the SQL Server backup history tables. Highlighted are the virtual device names from when the Netbackup policy runs. The other records are my native SQL Server backups.

[INT_RND]

This might be part of the VM quiesce process. A VM snapshot cannot occur if the system is busy.

If you think this behavior is undesirable you can open a support ticket. That is the only way to get feedback to engineering. 

[Michael_G_Ander · Accepted solution]

Probably caused by that the vmware snapshot provider calls the windows shadow copy volume snapshot provider which includes a writer for SQL.

If you don't want the SQL to be quiesced as a part of the snapshot, then disable the SQL VSS Writer service. Be aware that the SQL databases then will be an inconsistent state when doing a full VM restore.

 It might also cause issue with the file system/VM snapshot because of the IOs in the SQL databases