Environment Planning

Integration of SAP on Oracle and Veeam Plug-in requires additional environment planning. When you deploy the plug-in, keep in mind the following requirements and limitations.

Limitation for SAP Detection on Different Host

Scheduling

You can schedule backup processes using Cron.

Also, you can schedule and run existing SAP BR*Tools backup scripts within image-level or file-level backup job of Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Agent. For details, see the Pre-Freeze and Post-Thaw Scripts section of the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

Veeam Backup & Replication Users and Roles

Veeam Plug-in for SAP on Oracle uses the Windows authentication methods of the Veeam Backup & Replication server to establish a connection to this server and to the backup target.

If this user will be later changed manually, the new user must have at least the Veeam Backup Operator and Veeam Restore Operator rights within the Veeam Backup & Replication user management. To learn how to assign Veeam Backup & Replication roles, see the Users and Roles section of the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

Parallel Data Streams and Backup Repository Task Slots

Any parallel data stream started by SAP Backint will use one backup repository task slot. It is recommended to carefully plan repository task slots, so that SAP Backint can work with multiple channels in parallel.

The following hardware resources are recommended based on tests on Skylake processors:

SAP on Oracle server: 1 CPU core and a minimum of 200 MB of RAM per currently used channel. Note that resource consumption on the SAP on Oracle server depends on hardware and Oracle settings.
Backup repository server: 1 CPU core and 1 GB of RAM per 5 currently used channels.

These resources are recommended only if you use a dedicated backup repository for Veeam Plug-in backups. If you use the same backup repository for Veeam Plug-in backups and VM backups created by Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Agents, consider adding the hardware resources based on usual load on your backup repository. For details on hardware requirements for a backup repository, see the System Requirements section of the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

It is recommended to contact your Veeam system engineer to optimize the channel settings and resource allocation.

It is recommended to use a separate backup repository for Veeam Plug-in backups.

Veeam Backup & Replication server: during manual metadata operations such as import of backup files, the Veeam Backup & Replication server needs additional 15 GB of RAM per 1 million files located in the same backup job folder.

Backup Files

Veeam Plug-in stores backup files in the following formats:

A .VAB file stores a compressed copy of an Oracle database. Veeam Plug-in creates VAB files for both full and incremental backups.

A .VASM file stores metadata that contain information about the backup. A .VASM file is created for each .VAB file. The .VASM files are used by Veeam Backup & Replication to get data about Veeam Plug-in backups.

A .VACM file stores metadata of a backup job object.

Veeam Plug-in generates a name for the .VAB backup file and stores up to 1000 files in backup (FIBs) in one .VAB file. The FIB file names match the external backup IDs (EBID) generated by Veeam Plug-in during the backup.

Also, for each backup file, Veeam Plug-in creates a metadata file that has the same name as the backup file but a different extension (.VASM).

Limitation for SAP Detection on Different Host

Veeam Plug-in may not be able to detect SAP instances during the configuration if the Oracle Database and SAP central instance are running on different hosts. In you work with Veeam Plug-in in the managed mode, this configuration is not supported. If you work with Veeam Plug-in in the standalone operation mode, you can do the following:

Complete all the steps of the Veeam Plug-in configuration wizard described in the Configuring Plug-in for SAP on Oracle section. As a result, Veeam Plug-in will create a new veeam_initSID.sap initialization profile and save it in the /tmp/ directory.
Manually copy all lines from the new initialization profile to the default initialization profile. Alternatively, you can specify the path to the veeam_initSID.sap file in each BRBACKUP, BRRESTORE and BRARCHIVE command.

To learn more about operation modes, see Standalone and Managed Operation Modes.