Use Backup Templates to deploy Maintenance Plans for your Availability Groups (4378784)

In this Knowledge based article we will provide recommended best practices when working with Maintenance Plans (MP) and Always On Availability Groups (AG).

NOTES:

• A LiteSpeed backup template can only be deployed on a server that has LiteSpeed installed.
• If the target server LiteSpeed version does not support Adaptive Compression, the created jobs and maintenance plans will instead use the specified compression level.
• Regular expressions are only supported in Maintenance Plans.

GOAL:

• Set AG backup preferences. In this example we are running backups on the primary replica.
• Configure a Fast Compression backup template for AG databases.
• Deploy the template to all AG replica nodes.
• Test job execution results after a failover.

STEPS:

• In SSMS set AG backup preferences to Primary  
• Open LiteSpeed UI Console
• Go to Backup Templates tab  
• Create a New template
    
• Name the template and keep the default Fast Compression
   
• Select databases to backup. For this example we are selecting the database at deployment
   
• Chose backup destination configuration 
   
• Chose Separate backup files
• Set options and uncheck Optimize Object Level recovery speed. Backup escalation is a key option here, in case of a missing Full Backup, the job will create the Full backup instead of a differential backup
   
• Chose verification options
• Select encryption and compression options. Note: Compression 7 is recommended for cloud backups
   
• Determine backup schedule
• Specify notification options
• Add T-log schedule if needed. Note: in this example we were not scheduling T-log backups
• Leave MP settings as default
• Review cleanup options
• Save the template
   

DEPLOYMENT

• Select the newly created template and click deploy 
   
• Select instance and databases to backup. Important to include all replicas.
   
  
• Specify backup location
   
• Select Maintenance Plan option
   
• Complete deployment
   

FAILOVER TESTING

• Our simple two node AG currently has instance 'APXCAW22S22000' as primary and 'APXCAW22S22001' as secondary. These instances will be referenced as 00 and 01 respectively.
   
• Querying the MSDB backup history table for both instances, shows backups only taking place on replica 00, the primary.
   
• The job on replica 01 runs as scheduled yet backup is skipped as expected.
   
• Failover the primary role to node 01
   
• Backups stop generating on node 00
• A new backup chain is started on node 01