Take snapshots for Azure Managed Disks - SQL Stripped Disks

Question

We have SQL on Azure VM with 5 Data Disks Stripped P40s.

During the POC we intend to take the snapshots to go back to previous state.

My Q is -

1. Is snapshot possible for Stripped Data Disks ( SQL Data Disks on VM )
2. Is Azure Backup only option to take snapshots of Managed Disk. And will the Azure Backup support backup of Stripped Data Disks as well. ( Normal Disk is does and its known fact )

My Q is specific to use cases where we have Data Disks Stripped.

Thank you!

Answer 1

@Sid_1805

Although you can take a snapshot at any time, if the VM is running, there is still data being streamed to the disks. The snapshots might contain partial operations that were in flight. Also, if there are several disks involved, the snapshots of different disks might have occurred at different times. These scenarios may cause to the snapshots to be uncoordinated. This lack of coordination is especially problematic for striped volumes whose files might be corrupted if changes were being made during backup.

To avoid this situation, the backup process must implement the following steps:

1. Freeze all the disks.
2. Flush all the pending writes.
3. Create an incremental snapshot for managed disks for all the disks.

Azure Backup is not the only option here. For SQL Server backup, another option is to backup to Azure Blob storage. There are several challenges that you face when backing up SQL Server. These challenges include storage management, risk of storage failure, access to off-site storage, and hardware configuration. Many of these challenges are addressed by using Azure Blob storage for SQL Server backups.

Hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions.

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