VMware application backups do not support the following policy options and configurations:

• Incremental backups. Instead, you can create a protection plan or policy for SQL Server incremental backups.

• SQL Server clusters or SQL Server availability groups.

• (NetBackup web UI only) Restores from a non-primary copy. You can only restore from the primary copy. Only the primary copy is displayed for restore, even if there are other copies. If you want to restore from another copy, promote that copy to the primary copy.

• SQL Server databases are not cataloged and backed up if they exist on the following:

  • Any virtual machines that use raw device mapping (RDM).

  • Virtual Machine Disk (vmdk) volumes that are marked as independent.

  • Mount points that use MBR disks. Mount points that contain SQL Server database files are only supported when the underlying disk is a GPT disk.

  • Virtual hard disks (VHDs).

  • RAID volumes.

  • ReFS file systems.

  • An excluded Windows boot disk.

• For VMware backups with the T-SQL snapshots, the following limitations apply:

  • T-SQL snapshots require SQL Server 2022. If there are multiple SQL Server instances of different versions (for example, 2019 and 2022) on the guest virtual machine and T-SQL snapshots are enabled, the policy only protects the SQL Server 2022 instances or databases.

  • NetBackup limits the number of databases that can be processed simultaneously to 62.

  • Only user databases are protected. System databases cannot be protected with this method. This limitation is from Microsoft. (A policy can contain system databases, but NetBackup skips these databases.)

  • Log truncation is not supported with T-SQL snapshots.