Yes, it’s very difficult to get application consistency across an application that stores transactional data across several servers. Since Veeam uses VMware snapshots to create backups, we don’t have a way to control exactly when each snap gets created. For applications like you suggest (that store transactional data across several VM’s) the only true way to get a consistent backup would be to use agents on the VM’s that are aware of that particular application.

The intent of the post was not to say that Veeam can backup EVERY application by using VSS (the application itself has to be VSS aware) but simply state that Veeam’s VSS implementation is more complete than others out there, including VMware which is not application VSS aware on Windows Server 2008.

This is not only our own experience during our recent evaluation of Veeam, but also straight from the horse’s mouth – a Veeam engineer named Mikhail who sent me a somewhat condescending email.

When you have the requirement of having to take snapshots to backup systems that distribute their transactional information across multiple servers – such as Datasets with HP’s Trim eDRMS (which stores files on a regular file server and meta-data in an RDBMS) – then you are SOL with Veeam.

I wish it weren’t so – we liked Veeam and loved its performance, lack of needing a client agent, integration of both backup and replication in a single suite. But there’s hype and there’s the reality of real-word application suites.

If a vendor ever came out with a solution that meant we could manage the whole backup process with 1 piece of software it would be a high priority to investigate.

At the moment it tends to be virtualisation backup vendor (Veeam usually) and Traditional vendor (backup exec usually) for agents and to tape portion if needed.