SQLJocky (5/19/2011)
I'm very interested to ask if anyone has had any experience with Avamar in conjunction with VMWare and only doing VMDK backups and not doing any SQL backups. The theory from the storage and backup admin is that we can reach into the VMDK backup and grab the .mdf and .ldf files and restore them to a server and then just do an 'Attach' and let the logs replay. Any thoughts around that? I scares me to think that we are basing our entire backup/restore strategy on being able to 'Attach' a data and log file from a point in time backup of the VMWare image file that was running live when we took it.
We're running quite a few of our dev & test SQL instances (and a few prod ones, too) in VMWare, and we've already decided to back off from the VMDK approach. Scares me, too... I like to know what I'm working with!
One of my favorite "bugs" so far is the limitation on being able to restore a multi-file (3+ files) database onto a different host. Granted, we can dump the files to the OS and do an old-fashioned TSQL restore, but losing out on the ease of the console is a bit disappointing. Supposedly fixed in the latest version that we're supposed to be upgrading to in the next month or so.
Otherwise, the performance has stayed pretty true to what was advertised as we continue loading the system up, and the amount of data backed up (vs. amount scanned) averages about 3%. Granted, these are less volatile dev & test instances, so it will be interesting to see how that ratio changes as we start adding production environments to the mix.