Re: VM-Ware Backup of VM safe?

On Wed, Sep 20, 2017 at 5:45 PM, Albe Laurenz <laurenz(dot)albe(at)wien(dot)gv(dot)at> wrote:
> Thomas Güttler wrote:
>> We run a PostgreSQL 9.6 server in a virtual machine.
>>
>> The virtual machine is managed by the customer.
>>
>> He does backup the VM.
>>
>> Is this enough, is this safe?
>
> I don't know about VMware,

I heard about one or two things :)

> but the general rule is that
> if the backup is truly atomic (it is guaranteed to capture
> a consistent state of the file system), you can use it
> to backup the database.

There are two types of snapshots: quiesced and non-quiesced. You
definitely want a quiesced snapshot when taking a backup so as the
system gets into a consistent state when working on it. There should
be an option related to that on the vSphere client managing the VM, so
make sure that quiesced is enabled.
--
Michael