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Just a wee bit late getting this 1st VMCE practice question out to start this week, but I got side-tracked with the news of Veeam Legend announcement today 🙂 Congrats to all new Legends and of course to those renewed.

Now, let’s get to this week’s 1st question. And, as always...please hide those comments! Good luck!

What are 2 ways Veeam creates transactionally consistent Backups or Replicas?

  1. VMware Tools, VIX
  2. Scripts, Microsoft VSS
  3. Snapshots, CBT
  4. Microsoft VSS, CBT

B - I believe

 


  1. Scripts, Microsoft VSS

The key part of this question is the “transactionally consistent” phrase. You need to quiesce the services somehow, which can be done with pre/post thaw scripts or Microsft VSS.

 


  1. Scripts, Microsoft VSS

 


B: Scripts, Microsoft VSS

 


B.Scripts, Microsoft VSS

 

Veeam can make transaction consistent backups with the help of Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Microsoft VSS is able to coordinate all specific actions which should be done on a system in order to “quiesce” applications in the OS. It can pause the disk I/O when triggered and assist the backup software. Microsoft VSS is included in all Windows OS since Windows Server 2003.

 


 

C

 


A

 


  1. Scripts and VSS

 


B - Scripts, Microsoft VSS

 


Ok everyone...let’s get to those answers. And, thank you all for your engagement. Really appreciated!

This again is a pretty ‘black & white’ question. Not much grey area really. Answer options a., b., and d. have viable options in them, but are *both* values in each option correct? No. Let’s look at why → a. has VMware Tools, and yes...that is an option to create a transactionally consistent backup..with VMware Tools only. VIX is a protocol to communicate with VMware VMs so a. can’t be correct. C. isn’t correct because snapshots are a hypervisor point-in-time capture of VM disks to be able to backup workloads at a given moment, and CBT (changed block tracking) is used to be able to capture only changes in a VM for incremental backups. And btw...that’s why d. is also incorrect (it has CBT as an option). So the only option left is c. Scripts, Microsoft VSS. You can use VSS when you enable application-aware image processing (AAIP) from the Guest Processing section of a Job. And Scripts can essentially do the same thing when you configure this Tab from the Storage section > Advanced button area of a Job. For more info, see URL below:


https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/tools_quiescence.html?ver=120

 


Cool, I never used any scripts in a job. I wasn’t drawn to that answer 🤔


B- Scripts and MS VSS

 


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