SAP HANA

For a consistent and supported SAP HANA backup with Veeam you must use the SAP HANA Backint interface. You can extend your restore capabilities of HANA systems by adding an image level backup of your HANA system (VM or physical) to your Backint based database backup.

Image level backups

You can leverage the SAP HANA pre- and post-scripts to create a consistent HANA database snapshot before taking an image level VM/physical backup. These snapshots do not verify the consistency of the database on block level though, so you should not only rely on these. Image level backups are great to extend your possibilities for restores. Some use cases include restoring from a complete system loss or providing a test-machine based on the latest backup via Instant VM Recovery. These can be combined with technologies like storage snapshots to achieve very low RTOs.

The database snapshot taken during the pre-script process will be visible as a restore point in the native HANA tools, though it will only be available from the image level backup, as the post-script deletes this snapshot again from the productive system.

These kind of backups are mostly managed and leveraged by the infrastructure or backup team.

Note The linked script does not work in multi-tenant environments

Veeam Plug-in for SAP HANA (Backint)

Backups taken via the backint interface with the Veeam Plug-in for SAP HANA will be checked for consistency and are fully supported by SAP. These backups can be operated in managed-by-Veeam mode or via the native SAP HANA tools, like HANA Studio, HANA Cockpit or via SQL scripts. However, all restores are only supported through the native SAP HANA tooling.

Log backups are supported and recommended via the Backint interface. They can be configured via the native tools.

Restoring from these backups allows a lot of database restore scenarios, like rolling forward logs, etc.

These kind of backups are mostly managed and leveraged by the application team and DBAs.

Please review the general Enterprise Plug-In best practices additionally to the following.

Veeam Sizing

It is important to understand the amount of channels being used in parallel. Also consider the restore operations for the large environment where during the backup operations for database A and database B, you will need to perform restores for Database C.

Please refer to General Plug-In Design Best Practices and the the SAP HANA Backup Channels and Veeam Repository Task Slots section in the Veeam Help Center to size your Veeam repository resources.

SAP HANA configuration (global.ini)

For SAP HANA backint, most configuration items reside in a database configuration file called global.ini. Inside it is a backup section with self-explanatory parameters but you may consult the SAP HANA Administration Guide, if needed.

Which ones are important for Veeam Backups?

catalog_backup_using_backint

This determines if the catalog backup will be written to a local disk or to the Veeam repository. We recommended to set this to true to have the latest catalog version available with the backups in the Veeam repository.

parallel_data_backup_backint_channels

This determines how many channels will be used to write the data to a Veeam repository. The HANA service must be greater than 128GB of data (not RAM) to use parallel channels. The maximum number of channels is 32, but we encourage you to be cautious. The axiom we often suggest is to use as much as needed for performance and as low as possible for resources used. A recommended approach would be to start with as few as two or as many as four and double it per run to gauge the impact on the total time needed for the backup and restore to run. You should expect to see the time for the backup to complete change in a linear fashion. If not, you may be leveraging too many channels, consuming significant and valuable resources on the HANA instance and the Veeam repository. This can impact overall backint performance.

data_backup_buffer_size

Adjust this according to the configured number of channels. Consult the SAP HANA admin guide for details.

Other parameters should be set based upon guidance from SAP and/or Veeam support, as they are dependent upon specific elements within your environment and architecture. For example, larger systems may require you to change the backint_response_timout parameter to a higher value, possibly in conjunction with the log_backup_interval_mode. Both parameters influence how log backups are written into backint.

SAP HANA

Image level backups

Veeam Plug-in for SAP HANA (Backint)

Veeam Sizing

SAP HANA configuration (global.ini)

References