Experience and advice using Veeam with Caché

Question

Question

Murray Oldfield · Apr 21, 2017

I am looking for experience of people running Veeam with Caché databases.

Tips/Tricks/General questions like; what Veeam features are you using, what your backup cycle looks like, where does your data end up, what recovery/integrity checks you do, what sort of compression/dedupe you get.

Also what questions _you_ have and what problems you might be trying to solve.

Discussion (9)4

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Sean Connelly · Apr 25, 2017

I've found Veeam can cause problems in a mirrored environment for Cache.

We invested a great deal of energy trying to get to the bottom of this (with ISC) but never truly fathomed it out.

As you can imagine we tried all sorts of freeze thaw scripts and QOS settings. Whilst we did reduce the frequency we could not completely eliminate the problem.

In the end we came up with this strategy.

1. Run Veeam on the backup member nightly
2. Run Veeam on the primary member only once a week during the day
3. Only use Veeam as a way to restore the OS
4. This would exclude all DAT, Journal and WIJ files
5. Take a nightly dat backup of both members and stash several days of Journal files
6. Ensure the mirror pair are on completely different sets of hardware and ideally locations
7. Configure the DAT and Journal files to be on different LUNs on the VM setup
8. Understand how to physically recover these files should the server crash and not recover

Conclusion for me was that Veeam is a nice to have tool in a VM set-up, but it should not be a replacement for the battle tested cache backup solution.

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Vic Sun · Jan 14, 2022

Connor,

I'm not sure I understand what you're describing. Are you familiar with InterSystems mirroring? In short, it is a method of keeping two separate instances' data in sync, and can be used for reporting purposes. Do you really need just the deltas, and if so in what way would you be using them?

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score 0 · Answer 1 · 2017-04-25T07:58:59-04:00

In my previous company, administrator used Veeam to backup Caché databases as well. And as I know it works well. It uses some scripts to call ExternalFreeze Caché before, and ExternalThaw after, just backup, without any checks. All Caché instances work on Windows.

score 0 · Answer 2 · 2018-07-30T09:01:00-04:00

Hello @Sean Connelly

What kind of problems appeared?

We also have a mirrored environment and we're evaluating to use Veeam to do backups

Kind regards,

score 0 · Answer 3 · 2019-01-22T03:00:24-05:00

We had lot of problems with Veeam to make backups in VMware cluster.

However, the problem was due to a vmware bug. After we applied the patch, the problem dissappears completely and Veeam works like a charm

https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/59216?lang=en_US

Kind regards,

score 0 · Answer 4 · 2022-01-13T22:57:36-05:00

Hello All,

Can I configure the 'Incremental Backup' of an Intersystems CACHE DB using VEEAM? I want to extract the daily changes from a Production Cache DB into a separate Cache DB (used for BI and Reporting purposes) so I wish to minimise the backed up data to only take the 'deltas' compared to the previous day. Is this possible? -- Connor Jackson -- NHS -- UK

score 0 · Answer 5 · 2022-01-14T09:26:12-05:00

Hi Connor - is there a reason you can't use mirroring? I can imagine it would be possible to implement something custom where you capture the built-in online backup with Veeam snapshots, but it feels like there would be a lot more moving pieces.

score 0 · Answer 6 · 2022-01-14T10:06:25-05:00

Hello Vic,

Thanks for the reply. What I am trying to achieve is extracting just the 'deltas' i.e. those records in any table which have been created or updated since yesterday (or rather the last backup date). Is this possible using a 'mirroring' approach? If yes - please can you point me at some detailed resource which tells me 'how to do it'? -- Kind Regards Connor Jackson

score 1 · Answer 7 · 2022-01-14T10:34:02-05:00

Julian Matthews · Jan 14, 2022

Hey Connor.

You will likely want to look at this which describes reporting asyncs for mirroring.

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