This one falls into the category of “unlikely that it will happen to you but might be worth noting”. I’ve been working with some Cohesity gear in the lab recently and came across a warning, not an error, when I was doing a SQL backup.

But before I get to that, it’s important to share the context of the testing. With Cohesity, there’s some support for protecting Microsoft SQL workloads that live on Windows Failover Clusters (as well as AAGs – but that’s a story for another time). You configure these separately from your virtual sources, and you install an agent on each node in the cluster. In my test environment I’ve created a simple two-node Windows Failover Cluster based on Windows 2016. It has some shared disk and a heartbeat network (a tip of the hat to Windows clusters of yore). I’ve cheated, because it’s virtualised, but needs must and all that. I’m running SQL 2014 on top of this. It took me a little while to get that working properly, mainly because I’m a numpty with SQL. I finally had everything setup when I noticed the following error after each SQL protection job ran.

I was a bit confused as I had set the databases to full recovery mode. Of course, the more it happened, the more I got frustrated. I fiddled about with permissions on the cluster, manual maintenance jobs, database roles and all manner of things I shouldn’t be touching. I even went for a short walk. The thing I didn’t do, though, was click the arrow on the left hand side of the job. That expands the job run details so you can read more about what happened. If I’d done that, I would have seen this error straight away. And the phrase “No databases available for log backup” would have made more sense.

And I would have realised that the reason I was getting the log backup warning was because it was skipping the system databases and, as I didn’t have any other databases deployed, it wasn’t doing any log backups. This is an entirely unlikely scenario in the real world, because you’ll be backing up SQL clusters that have data on them. If they don’t have data on them, they’re likely low value items and won’t get protected. The only situation where you might come across this is if you’re testing your infrastructure before deploying data to it. I resolved the issue by creating a small database. The log backups then went through without issue.

For reference, the DataPlatform version I’m using is 5.0.1.