Drive Snapshot/MS SQL Server Conflict?

I have a server with Windows Server 2008 Standard SP2, 32 GB RAM, running MS SQL Server 2008, and back this server up every night using Tom Ehlert’s Drive Snapshot backup software, version 1.39, at a time when little else (or nothing) is running on the server.

The backups run between 110 and 130 GB per night. At the start of the year this data was being backed up in 1 to 1.5 hours but now it regularly takes 12 to 15 hours to back up the same amount of data, and sometimes up to 24 hours.

Can anyone suggest a reason why this backup now takes so long to run? It is the only one of the six servers I manage that takes so long… one server, for example, only takes 11 to12 hours to back up over 1 TB of data.

I’m wondering if there’s a conflict between the backup software and SQL? As I write this I see, in Task Manager, that the sqlservr.exe task is using over 13 GB of memory, and I’ve seen it as high as 21 GB. If that is the problem, is there any way I can restrict SQL Server from consuming so much memory? Or can anyone suggest any other possibilities?

Thanks in advance,
Peter J. Bray

 

Any SW used for MSSQL server backups needs to either support VSS or you need to shut down the SQL server before backup. Yeah, you can restrict memory usage for MSSQL, even per instance, IIRC. Can't check right now.