Hi All,

We have a farm that has 4 WFE server (virtual) , 2 application servers (virtual)  and 1 SQL cluster (physical). Before making any major changes or service pack in farm, as per current backup approach, below backups are taken.

• snapshot of WFE servers are taken
• snapshot of application servers are taken
• SQL backup of all the SQL databases (i.e. Config DB, Contents DBs and Service Application Dbs are taken).

I suppose that is enough. Should I include any other backup here?

Snapshots aren't supported for SharePoint in a virtual environment. Your best bet is to take a Full Farm Backup (Backup-SPFarm) as it provides more information on a restore than a simple SQL database backup will.

our virtual server are on VM ware environment and I have been taking the snapshots without any problem.

I agree with your point that we should take the Full Farm Backup however I have not been using this option since we have 12TB of documents in farm and running the Full Farm Backup will take quite huge time. In order to save time we have been using the approach that I have mentioned.

Unfortunately you need a supportable approach with a farm with that much content, and what you're doing is not supportable.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff621085(v=office.14).aspx#Snapshot

You're not able to take snapshots granular enough to synchronize all of your SharePoint VMs and SQL Servers (unless you shutdown SharePoint itself), so a restore of the snapshots would be invalid.

Since you cannot restore the Configuration nor Administration databases in the event of a farm failure, neither are worth backing up. Instead, running a Backup-SPFarm not only backs up the appropriate SQL databases attached to the farm, but also exports configuration objects from the Configuration database for a farm restore.

It sounds like with the amount of content you're dealing with, an alternative SharePoint backup product is necessary, e.g. DPM or 3rd party.

Hi Trevor,

here is the process.

1. Disable the load balancer.
2. Shutdown all the WFE servers
3. Shutdown all the application servers
4. Start the SQL backups.
5. Start the snapshot process for all the WFE servers and application servers.

So we are already considering the shutdowning the VMs before taking the snapshots.

Are we safe now?

Yep, that is supported, but not recommended due to performance of what are essentially differencing disks until the snapshot is merged.