Windows VM with Oracle DB and backups

[jf21]

Hello,

i am wondering if anyone here is running a windows VM with oracle DB. My question is whether the snapshots that can be done with proxmox/qemu-agent are working when using oracle db. I see that qema-agent supports guest-fsfreeze on windows which should work with oracle and not cause inconsistency.
Is anyone running a setup like this with working backups that can offer some insight?

 

[wolfgang]

Hi,

qemu-guest-agent use the vss infrastructure, so if Oracle uses this it will work.

 

[LnxBil]

qemu-guest-agent use the vss infrastructure, so if Oracle uses this it will work.

Yes, it does:
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/B28359_01/win.111/b32010/vss.htm#BABJEGCA

Is anyone running a setup like this with working backups that can offer some insight?

Depends on what kind of backup do you want. Oracle provides data consistency with different goals in mind. A simple VM backup will not use any of these techniques and is only a worst case data recovery option in case of a VM failure. I'd never encountered that in my life - hardware yes, but not a VM.
Most of the time, you'll need other mechanisms like Flashback Query or Flashback Database for simple "mistakes" or a real backup with point-in-time-recovery. I'd recommend to use RMAN and storing the files outside of your VM for data recovery purposes. If you are in a country covered by EU-GDPR, you need to have a real backup with RMAN to fulfill the requirements, a snapshot or backup once a day is not enough.

 

[rholighaus]

For both VMs and CTs, I rely on ZFS and I am using a combination of znapzend (https://github.com/oetiker/znapzend) and PVE Replication.

PVE replication is for fast migration / recovery to a second PVE server in the same rack in case of a hardware failure, plus to a third PVE server in another building to prevent data loss in case of fire.

znapzend is used for automatic snapshots (hourly in most cases) and for replication to an off-site (colocation) server. I'm doing hourly snapshots for fast recovery of simple "mistakes". Snapshots are kept hourly for 24 hours, then one per day for 7 days, one per week for 4 weeks and one per month for 12 months. The snapshots are also replicated by PVE.

I guess that you could also use pve-zsync instead of znapzend for off-site replication and snapshots. I just haven't yet found an easy tool to configure to configure it to keep snapshots the way znapzend keeps and syncs them...

The off-site server and the one in the other building are both HP Micro Servers Gen8 (unfortunately, no longer available) with 4x2TB disks running PVE; they are not power-hungry and inexpensive, but fully remote-manageable using HP's ILO. The Gen10 microservers are also inexpensive and low-energy, but no longer ILO manageable :-(

 

[brian93]

If your are interested in using a third party solution to backup your Proxmox VMs to a variety of different backup destinations, you should check out vProtect, by Catalogic Software I believe. Takes a ton of the manual work out of protecting your VMs. They support a bunch of different hypervisors. We use them for KVM and XenServer backups and it works great. Pretty inexpensive too!