This is rather a philosophical question, I went through the FAQs and the forum but I didn't find anything about this.
I have a VM with a database running on it, if I take a snapshot (to back up the VM) the database files should be open inside it so if I later restore this back-up the database should be corrupted, I guess.
Can anybody tell me if this is correct?
My guess is that to back up this VM I need to shutdown the VM first to preserve the database. But it will be nice if I could do the backup without shutdown.
TIA
ST
VM CentOS 5.7 mysql, glassfish3.1 running in vSphere 5.0 free version