Backing up Oracle RAC VM's

Hi

I use Esxi as a lab for my Oracle VM’s , research and development etc.

Veeam cannot process the RAC VM virtual disks as they are both shared/multi writer and independent persistent disks. Yes , I can backup the databases , but RAC has a huge amount of config on the system disk etc.

My solution, albeit a partial non Production solution is to create a new VM , and add the disks used by the RAC Cluster VM,s I then modify the new VM to change the disks to non multi writer , dependent disks. 

This VM will never be started , it will remain shutdown. But I can back it up, if I shutdown the parent RAC VM’s. The shutdown and startup is performed by pre and post backup scripts.

Script contents

c:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh -v -i c:\users\****\.ssh\id_rsa.pub  -E c:\scripts\shutdown_onedisks_ssh.log -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no root@*******.localdomain  "vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms | grep RACONEDISK1 | grep -v RACONEDISK1DR | cut -d ' ' -f1 | while read id ; do vim-cmd vmsvc/power.shutdown $id ; done >//vmfs/volumes/SCRATCH/scripts/shutdown_onedisks.log 2>&1" > shutdown_onedisks.log

(MY RAC cluster is 2 node/ 2 VMs , booting off one disk , which has two boot partitions and many partitions for  ASM disks for OCR/VOTE/DATA/FRA/OH etc - a single 300GB vmdk used by two VM’s...)

Repeat for all nodes in the cluster.

It’s a cold backup , involves loss of service etc , but scheduled during the night , it does not affect me.

In case you are an Oracle DBA using ESXi and need to backup a RAC cluster so you don't have to spend a lot of time to re-install / re-configure etc, I hope this method will work for you.

It’s good to share, but you’d be helping the whole community by posting in one of these threads instead.

https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-replication-f2/

Cheers, Rob.

Thanks Rob, my first post, still getting to know my way around.

No worries. It’s not very obvious, but the Veeam user community is split into multiple websites. The forums.veeam.com is always the best place to start (if you haven’t already logged a call with Support), followed by the individual VUG’s.

There’s also some bits and pieces on Github as well, although Veeam are trying to move it in-house instead - https://community.veeam.com/script-library-67

Hope that helps.

Thank you 😎 Very interesting post.

The community is a good place to post this. You could use one of the categories “Script Library" or “Blogs and Podcasts" for such content.

You can post it additional in the forums 😉

Interesting post for sure but as noted by Joe maybe the script library section. ☝️. Welcome to the community.