Azure VM manual SQL install - Azure VM snapshot backup interferes with SQL bckup

  • Hi,

    If you setup a Azure VM and later manually install SQL server, and you enable Azure VM backup, the Azure VM snapshot backup uses VSS to do "full backups" as well.  That interferes with the normal SQL backups, because the DIFF's will complain that the corresponding FULL is missing due to LSN changes by the VSS SQL writer based VM snapshot backup.

    The workaround for this is simple; disable the SQL VSS writer service.

    But.... disabling the SQL VSS writer in an Azure VM will result in a disk backup while the SQL files are still open, which could theoretically could result in a non-startable SQL config after a restore of the VM from such an image.

    So I was wondering, is it possible to configure SQL VSS in such a way that the VM image backups leave the DB LSN pointers alone, and yet still backup the SQL data files in a closed state?

    That way we can have consistent VM backups with a guaranteed startable SQL config, and have no interruption to our "normal" SQL backup chain.

    Theo Ekelmans

    NL

  • Twan, a good collegue of mine, had an excellent idea.... a registry key that would direct Azure VM snaps to use COPY ONLY backups.

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