I have spent hours trying to figure why so many articles say, or imply, that restoring a crash-consistent snapshot backup (one made without invoking VSS) can lead to data loss on a VM running SQL Server. I understand that, of course, any in-flight transactions would be lost, and that restart could take a long time if there were large transaction in flight. But what, if any, reasonable scenario would lead to corruption of the database?
To further confuse the matter, I found one (rather old) Dell vRanger support article which says that crash-consistent backups are OK but using a file-system quiesce without invoking SQL VSS can corrupt SQL Server. Huh?
To put the same question another way, if I suddenly pull the plug on a standalone physical SQL server, or a physical VMware host running SQL Server on a VM, might a database fail to come online when the server is restarted? If yes, why? I ask because I am expecting SQL server automatic database recovery to work every time.