Windows 2008r2 standard Master and Media servers running NBU 7.6.0.4
I'm trying to reclaim some disk space on our backup targets, and one area I see potentially significant savings may me in the backup of several VM's we have that run SQL databases. There are approximately 60 such servers in our environment.
So, what is happening is that the VM policies are backing up the VMDK file (VMware policy type), which is also capturing the volumes which contain the sql databases. But, we are also running daily MS-SQL-Server policies for each of the sql databases that reside on these servers, so we are capturing this data twice.
Since we have quite a few of these, and they are VM's, I'd like to exclude the database volumes from getting captured in the VMDK backup, in the policy. But, since these VM's are SQL servers, they do require the NBU agent to be installed, which means I could also use the standard exclusion lists in the client properties to do this as well (much more time and work).
Choice 1). Use the "exclude data disks" option and continue to back these sql servers up using a VMware policy
Choice 2). Move these SQL vm's into an MS-Windows policy type, and use the client's exclusion list to omit backup of *.ldf, *.ndf, *.mdf files.
Please let me know your thoughts.
Thanks all!
Todd