Oracle Environment Planning

Before you deploy Veeam Plug-in, consider the following requirements and limitations.

[For Linux OS and Unix] Consider the following prerequisites:

Before you install Veeam Plug-in, make sure that the /opt/veeam directory is writable.
Before you configure Veeam Plug-in, make sure that the NOEXEC mount option is disabled for the /var directory.

Veeam Plug-in runs SQL queries on the Oracle database to collect statistical information about the RMAN job processes. As with any other SQL queries, Oracle can decide based on availability of hardware resources to use Oracle Temp Tablespace for these queries. Make sure that you configure the Temp Tablespace resources to avoid shortage of temporary tablespace.

Scheduling

You can schedule backup processes with all Oracle RMAN relevant scheduling options like Cron, Windows Task Scheduler, UC4 and TWS.

If you use Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Agents to create image-level backups of the Oracle server, you can schedule the backup job and run Oracle RMAN backup scripts along with the backup job. For detailed instructions on how to add Oracle RMAN scripts to a backup job, see the one of the following guides:

For Veeam Backup & Replication: Pre-Freeze and Post-Thaw Scripts section of the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.
For Veeam Agent for Windows: Pre-Freeze and Post-Thaw Scripts section of the Veeam Agent for Windows User Guide.
For Veeam Agent for Linux: Pre-Freeze and Post-Thaw Scripts section of the Veeam Agent for Linux User Guide.

Note

If you want to use Oracle RMAN scripts within backup jobs of Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Agents, consider the following:

A backup job does not control the workflow of Oracle RMAN scripts. The backup job invokes the script and gets its exit status when the script is finished. Backup job logs show whether the script executed successfully or failed. The script is considered to be executed successfully if "0" is returned. To see that the script failed, configure the script to return an exit status different than "0" in case of any errors.
The default timeout for a custom script in a backup job is 10 minutes. If it takes longer than 10 minutes to run the script, you can open a support ticket to increase the timeout.

Oracle RAC

Consider the following for Oracle RAC:

It is recommended to install Veeam Plug-in on each RAC server that is responsible for the backup operations. If the plug-in is not installed on all nodes, the backup process may fail when RMAN selects another node.
Veeam Plug-in supports parallel execution of all operations supported by Oracle RMAN: backup, restore, crosscheck, remove. This applies to execution of these commands on one or multiple databases residing on one or multiple RAC nodes.
If you use Veeam Explorer for Oracle to restore a RAC database with different settings, it will not be restored as a cluster database. It will be restored as a standalone database.

Oracle Backup Encryption

The Oracle Secure Backup SBT library is the only interface that supports RMAN encrypted backups. Veeam Plug-in does not support encrypted backups of Oracle databases. If the backup encryption is enabled, Veeam Plug-in backup jobs fail with the following error: ORA-19919: encrypted backups to tertiary storage require Oracle Secure Backup. To avoid the error, you must disable the backup encryption on the Oracle side.

Naming of Database Files

Veeam Plug-in for Oracle RMAN does not support non-printable ASCII charset symbols that have decimal values from 0 through 31 and 127 in ASCII table. If Veeam Plug-in meets a database file with such symbol, the backup operation finishes with an error.

Naming of Backup File

During backup and restores, Veeam Plug-in uses the repositoryID parameter from the plug-in configuration file (veeam_config.xml). In the veeam_config.xml file, the repository ID is stored in the following format: repositoryID=“xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx”.

To name backup files, Veeam Plug-in uses the following format by default:

CONFIGURE CHANNEL DEVICE TYPE sbt PARMS 'SBT_LIBRARY=/opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforOracleRMAN/libOracleRMANPlugin.so’ FORMAT 'xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx/RMAN_%I_%d_%T_%U.vab’;
CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP FORMAT FOR DEVICE TYPE SBT_TAPE TO '%F_RMAN_AUTOBACKUP.vab’;

If you select multiple Veeam backup repositories and disable RMAN copy processing:

Backup files will be read by default from the first selected repository. Same naming rules apply as in the single repository scenario.

If you select multiple Veeam backup repositories and enable RMAN copy processing, you must use the repository ID with the “/” sign as a prefix for the backup file names (see the example above). This allows RMAN to directly access the requested backup file on one of the copy extents.

Note

[For Linux, Unix, Windows] In a backup file name, you cannot use symbols reserved by Microsoft Windows: "<" , ">", ":", "/", "\", "|", "?", "*". To learn more about file naming conventions, see this Microsoft article.

Backup of Control File and SPFILE

If you set CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP to ON, then RMAN automatically creates a control file and an SPFILE backup after you run the BACKUP command. For details, see this Oracle article.

Controlfile Autobackup File Naming

If you perform the restore with different name and settings using Veeam Explorers for Oracle, you must enable the autobackup of the control file. If you use the Controlfile Autobackup option, the Veeam Plug-in configuration wizard creates the following RMAN configuration entry:

CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP FORMAT FOR DEVICE TYPE SBT_TAPE TO '%F_RMAN_AUTOBACKUP.vab’;

If you enable the control file autobackup after configuring Veeam Plug-in, you can start the configuration wizard again. The control file backup naming option will be set to default.

If you enable the control file autobackup for a server or Oracle RAC with several databases and these databases have the same database ID (DBID), RMAN will create autobackup files with the same names. Autobackup files with the same names will lead to Veeam Plug-in operation errors. To avoid such a case, you must provide unique names for databases within the server or Oracle RAC. For example, you can add unique identifiers. The following example shows how you add a unique identifier to the database using the db_unique_name parameter:

CONFIGURE CONTROLFILE AUTOBACKUP FORMAT FOR DEVICE TYPE SBT_TAPE TO '%F_ORCLUNIQNAME_RMAN_AUTOBACKUP.vab';

Parallel Processing

Veeam Plug-in supports parallel backup processing for up to 4 backup repositories or scale-out backup repositories. In the plug-in configuration wizard, if you select more than one repository, the parallelism functionality will be enabled automatically.

Note that your Oracle Enterprise Edition must be able to use RMAN parallel processing.

Additional Files to Back up

Veeam Plug-in creates backups of databases and logs. Apart from these files,

Oracle Home

It is recommended to back up the Oracle home folder in addition to RMAN backups. You can back it up with Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Agents.
If the Oracle home folder is on a shared disk, you can use the file-level backup functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Agent for Linux. Alternatively, you can copy the Oracle home folder to a non-shared disk before the backup.

Oracle Recovery Catalog

You can back up the Oracle Recovery Catalog with Veeam Plug-in on the Recovery Catalog server according to the Oracle procedures. For details, see this Oracle article.

Veeam Plug-in for RMAN Configuration File

You can back up the Veeam Plug-in configuration file. The file is located in the following directory:

[Linux or Unix]: /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforOracleRMAN/veeam_config.xml

[Windows]: %PROGRAMFILES%\Veeam\VeeamPluginforOracleRMAN\veeam_config.xml

Note

You can also create an image-level backup of the Oracle server using the image-level backup functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Agents.

Disabling Veeam Explorer Processing

You can disable Veeam Explorer based restore for specific Oracle servers. To disable the restore on the Veeam Explorer for Oracle side, do the following:

[Linux or Unix] On the Oracle server, log in as a user with the Oracle Administrator rights and create an empty file in the following directory: /etc/veeam/disablerestore
[Windows] On the Oracle server, create an empty file in the following directory: %ProgramData%\Veeam\disablerestore

Oracle Data Guard

Since version 11, Veeam Plug-in for Oracle RMAN has an official support of Oracle Data Guard.

Database Recovery

If you want to restore a database with a different name and settings using Veeam Explorer for Oracle, the database must use SPFILE. If SPFILE is not used, you will see a warning during a plug-in configuration.