My question is there anyway now that I’m running SP1 of Virtual Server to do a VSS copy in real time without the servers being “save stated”?

It was possible prior to SP1 (we did it using a 3rd party tool that did VSS copies) and while I understand the implications of it being like “pressing reset”, this was acceptable to us for an emergency backup/restore scenario as it allowed us to make a backup of the image without having to turn it off.

Thanks.

And Computer Mischief – the backup systems you mention aren’t anything close to the same as backing up virtual machines from the outside. You can’t even compare them.

I’m very satisfied with what I’ve seen of the script and am rolling it out in my testbed now and fairly certain it will make it to my production environment before much longer.

I also enjoy these discussions and collaboration…the synergies formed from the collective are invaluable!

On the other hand you have the nervous “but it does’nt back up what is currently in memory” therfore is not consistent. I beg to differ as Symantec Netbackup, Backup exec, Brightstor blah,blah clients do not do this either. They capture the system state information which isn’t superior, a mere collection of necessary systems bits and bobs inc registry, iis, boot info, com and dcom stuff etc, etc

The point is a Commando IT engineer in a High availability environment, now has the ability to restore an entire machine in a couple of relatively hastle free minutes (When using disk staging) and without the complaints of VPN users that decide that midnight is the best time of day for them to work.

Suspending every server for a short period every night might suit some, BUT who can actually say that in a server farm of 20 + servers all suspend + backup + unsuspend in 5-20 minutes, a little hopeful I feel. Plus what about when the thing gets stuck as you have to answer questions to get it going again.

I am not fond of being lynched when I walk in in the morning as there is only 1st line IT Support where I work.

Although of Course the IT Commando is a dead man if the server being backed up generates so much IO that the Volumes become corrupted (I have never seen this though). I have seen mild issue which are resolved by chkntfs /f, as during the backup data does change which leaves the ntfs bitmap a little confused as to where some files went and where these new ones came from.

Thanks!

1) With my already running virtual server, I went to SQL Server, created a new table, inserted a couple rows into it.
2) immediately after this I went to start the redmonmag script on this virtual machine. The virtual machine was up 100% while this was running in the background.
3) when the script was done, I copied the virtual machine files over to another machine.
4) I did an add on the second virtual server to add these backed up files.
5) started it up, it was not in a saved state, it booted up and asked me for a reason for the unexpected previous shutdown.
6) I logged into SQL and my table was there and so were my records.

So All looks good in this scenario. I guess the DML and DDL I issued get written down to the SQL Log file immediately..I wasn’t sure if it took a while for the disk changes to make it down to the VHD, but at any rate, all of my transactions that were committed at the time of the script execution made it to copied server. So far I can’t find any negatives for this script. I wonder if what the guest OS is makes a difference? I’m running W2k3 Server.

vshadow.exe -p -script=setvar1.cmd %Vol1% %Vol2% %Vol3%

I haven’t had time to fully test this theory yet, but I wonder whether this may explain why some people have had problems running the scripts.

The vshadow.exe utility doesn’t actually interface with Virtual Server. It just snapshots the disk volume on the host. In Microsoft’s own documentation, they say that the backup solution must be Virtual Server aware in order to work (as indicated in the article above), and vshadow isn’t.

The script _I_ use is a slight modification of this one:

http://cwashington.netreach.net/depo/view.asp?Index=1156&ScriptType=vbscript

There’s a less complex version of the above script linked in the Redmond Mag article (here if you are interested: http://cwashington.netreach.net/depo/view.asp?Index=1049&ScriptType=vbscript). If you look at the script Chris Wolf wrote, its basically the same script with the Virtual Server suspend/restore logic stripped out.

If I ended up with a customer that ran 24/7, I guess that would be a reason to use Data Protection Manager. Or just do the backup during shift change.

My conclusion was anything in memory and not written to disk will be discarded. This could have an impact on SQL and on Exchange. I guess it would be interesting to learn more about this script, I hope to use it in our production environment for backing up some of our virtual servers, would love to hear others thoughts.

Are you certain that the virtual machine isn’t first being suspended and then restored? I’ve seen some cases where, even if not being specifically put to sleep, that this was happening. Usually with virtual machines that were originally created in earlier (pre SP1) versions of Virtual Server.

Try this: Start up some programs and leave them running. Perform the backup. When you restore to the backed up images are the programs still running?

If not, that (to me) is not a transactionally consistent backup, and unless someone proves otherwise I wouldn’t think that Exchange and SQL databases are being handled correctly.