Disaster Recovery with VMWare

[Former Member]

Hello,

we have an SQL Anywhere 12 server running on a VMWare virtual machine. Our server team has been tasked to provide disaster recovery across all our systems and have been asking us about SQL Anywhere recovery. That's OK, we have that in hand.

It turns out that what they are looking at is using VMWare's Site Recovery Manager to replicate the VM to another site. We know that you can't do anything (copy/replace) a running db in the operating system, but SRM apparently operates outside the O/S.

Does anyone use VMWare and SRM to replicate machines running SQL Anywhere and if so, does it copy over running databases properly/successfully?

Thanks, Paul

[jeff_albion · Accepted solution]

Hi Paul,

I have mentioned VM snapshots on my previous answer here regarding third-party database backups:

http://sqlanywhere-forum.sap.com/questions/6948/recommendation-for-3rd-partly-online-backup-tool

Also see here for SAP's statement on virtualization support: https://service.sap.com/sap/support/notes/1492000, namely:

SAP only supports virtualization solutions that behave in a fully transparent manner to the application. If the virtualization solution does not behave fully transparently, the relevant technology partner must provide support for the virtualization solution to become transparent. If a support issue cannot be solved by the technology partner, the SAP application might need to be migrated to a non-virtual environment.

So if the operation is completely transparent to SQL Anywhere (i.e. all contents of disk/memory are intact), this should work without issue.

Of course, since this is your backup and recovery plan, we very much encourage thorough testing of the recovery steps to ensure that the database does come back okay.

Regards,

Jeff Albion

SAP Active Global Support

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Jeff,

I guess that since SRM operates underneath the operating system, it must be transparent to SQL Anywhere. We'll have to give it a go.

Many Thanks, Paul