Hyper-V snapshot backup strategy appropriate for production SQL server?

Question

So SQL Server 2008 in Hyper-V is a supported configuration, and should perform well as long as you use fixed or pass-through disks and increase your processor/memory settings appropriately. My question is can I use snapshots as a reliable backup mechanism, or should I use the tried and trusted maintenance plan to do my backups?

Answer 1

You should NOT use Hyper-V snapshots as your backup strategy for SQL. Stick with something (built-in or otherwise) that will do SQL aware backups.

Hyper-V snapshots (in my opinion) should only be used on production servers for very short term disaster recovery. If you're doing an upgrade, do a snapshot first, immediately test when done, then ditch the snapshot. This sort of thing should be done along side your regular backups, not in place of it.

If you were to move to Hyper-V snapshots as your sole backup strategy, you'd lose the ability to restore your databse to another server & do point in time restores of the database - among other things that I'm sure I'm just not thinking of now.

Answer 2

Virtualization Snapshots for Hyper-V or any virtualization vendor are not supported to use with SQL Server in a virtual machine. It is possible that you may not encounter any problems when using snapshots and SQL Server, but Microsoft will not provide technical support to SQL Server customers for a virtual machine that was restored from a snapshot

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/956893/en-us