I have some Windows 2008 R2 guests that are mostly used for running statistical data jobs and utilities such as printing, SFTP and application sharing. There are 2 that run SQL, but no Exchange, Sharepoint, etc. Also some Linux web servers mostly running Apache, but one MySQL server. I'm backing up the VMs strictly for disaster recovery (data backups are separate) using VM Explorer. My understanding is that the SQL server snapshots need to be quiesced to preserve database consistency. If I don't care what is in memory or capturing the state of a SAS/Stata job, the other servers don't need to be quiesced, correct? Is there another advantage to quiescing that I should be aware of?
Thanks.