Correct way of backing up VC

[khughes]

Right now I have been watching our VC's hard drive slowly grow over the past month. I think I know the reason why the hard drive is slowly filling up but not quite sure of the means to fix it. In the SQL folder it isnt' purging or writing the translog files to the database (attached is a screenshot of the files). We run a FLB with Veritas and the only thing that is getting backed up on our VC is c:\progam...\microsoft sql server\mssql\backup folder.

Is ther somthing else we should be doing to either commit those logs or purge them?

[RParker]

This is the principle reason you should not have SQL database inside the VC. It slows your system. You should move SQL to it's own server, otherwise you are going to have performance issues in VC.

Then you only need to be concerned with the SQL data. VC doesn't need to be backed up.

[khughes]

There is no performance issues with the VC, the hard drives are slowly growning, not the server is slowing down. We would like to backup the VC to hold onto historical data if we can. Granted I know it would be faster in a DR standpoint to rebuild the server out from scratch, but there should be a way to commit those translogs

[azn2kew]

Depends on what environment you're using. It is small or large ESX farm? If its huge and you should dedicated SQL 2005 Cluster for your VC. Also configure for log shipping, log truncate and make sure to re-index your database so it could be organize and speed up. Transaction logs tend to build up very fast depends how large your environment that's why you have to truncate, and ship your logs to remote location. If you want to backup your VC database and record all configurations and settings such as jobs and tasks. Create new DB in your SQL 2005 cluster environment, restore from backup database and point your OBDC to new server and settings and restart your VC services.

"The Power of Knowledge"

[khughes]

I don't consider it large, just 4 ESX hosts and about 20 VM's, and it's running SQL 2000. I feel we don't need to upgrade to 2005 and have a straight sql server for it but I could be wrong. I'm no SQL guy but from what I think I know the translog files are changes to the database and need to be committed to it when a process is run or the database is backed up or something along those lines.

Overall, are we just wasting our time backing up that box to keep historical data?

[EnsignA]

The correct way of backing up VC is backing up the SQL database. You can re-install if you have a good copy of the DB. You can clear historical copies of the tranaction logs and DB backups using the built in SQL Server Agent by setting up the backup job to remove files older than xxx days.

You might want to consider running the VC database in "simple" recovery mode. It would not be necessary to run transaction log backups, you would only run full DB backups. The downside is that you can only recover to the last full backup. That is a decision only you can make.