SQL and BMR

[Dan_Doyle]

Hello Everyone!

This is my first post and could really use some help. 

Currently we are backing up SQL to a .bak file and then using NetBackup to backup the .bak files (I know the agent would be better this is out of my hands). What I am looking for is the best way to backup the SQL server itsself. Right now our DR plan is to deploy a VM template with SQL installed on it and restore the .bak to the newly deployed template.

We had a table top DR exercise the other day with SQL and found out because of our many different versions of SQL this took a long time. I have never used BMR before but thought this might be the way to go. A while ago we also tried to backup the VMDK but the snapshot filled the lun so that is not possible either

I am open to suggestestion on this. I dont want the company to go to a third party company just to backup the SQL server. They are looking at a product called light speed. I know Netbackup can do what that software does 

thank you for any help

OS: 2008/2012

VMware verison: 5.5

NBU Version 8.0

5230 appliance with 3.0 

[Mike_Gavrilov · Accepted solution]

Hi! You can use BMR for your porposes but you need to install NetBackup into the VM (if you backup files from VM it means that it's already there ). BMR is pretty simple and if your SQL servers are VMs then you can avoid all those DHCP and PXE-boot server possible issues and use ISOs for booting.

[Dan_Doyle]

Thanks for the reply Mike!

So BMR creats an ISO for VM? I will have to look more into it.

[Mike_Gavrilov]

It can create ISO for booting (instead of PXE-boot) and you can use this iso to boot VM and start restore from backup created earlier.