Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
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dlowe
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Enhancement Option for Veeam Scheduling for App Level Retry

Post by dlowe »

We currently backup a number of Exchange servers, and usually there are one or two VMs each night that fail on application level quiescing of Exchange the first time around, and they do a successful retry as per our configured scheduling configuration settings; However every now and then one of the exchange servers may fail on all retries and not get backed up. I then have to temporarily disable 'Require successful application processing' under the advanced guest processing, run a manual retry, and then re-enable the 'Require successful application processing' again.

My suggestion would be for Veeam to add it to their roadmap to make a modification to the scheduling secition in a future release, whereby there is an additional checkbox next to the 'Retry failed VMs processing:" box, that says "Ignore application processing failures after final retry attempt" (could say 'on' final retry attempt). This would allow us to get a successful backup each night, set the job status to 'Warning' instead of 'Failed', and we would not have to do the manual process to ensure the server is backed up each night (even if just a crash consistent backup).

I suggested this to Veeam Support during a recent Support Case # 00543912, and also to Pre-Sales who came to our site recently, and they suggested posting this on the forums.
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Enhancement Option for Veeam Scheduling for App Level Re

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Hello Darryl,

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. Can you please tell me what is the common reason for these failures? VSS timeouts? Also as far as I understand you basically want to ignore VSS freeze failures on the job retries? How many retries do you have configured, the default number (3)?

Thank you!
pkelly_sts
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Re: Enhancement Option for Veeam Scheduling for App Level Re

Post by pkelly_sts » 1 person likes this post

This is a very useful potential feature.

One example I can see for its use is the battle between "app guys" & "server guys". Now & then we have vss-related issues which are only fixed by rebooting the failing VM which might be someone elses responsibility. Sometimes you can ask them repeated times to schedule a reboot of the server to resolve the issue so you can get backups but they keep "forgetting" and are missing backups. Some time later you decide you value /your/ job more than they value theirs so you untick the requirement for queiescing just to get /something/.

It would be most useful to have a final "back that sucker up regardless of application aware state" option at the end of the normal retries.

Paul
dlowe
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Re: Enhancement Option for Veeam Scheduling for App Level Re

Post by dlowe »

Vitaliy S. wrote:Hello Darryl,

Thanks for the feedback, much appreciated. Can you please tell me what is the common reason for these failures? VSS timeouts? Also as far as I understand you basically want to ignore VSS freeze failures on the job retries? How many retries do you have configured, the default number (3)?

Thank you!
Most common reason is the Exchange 20sec VSS timeout window when doing app level backups. We have 7 retries configured and many times it's just 1 or 2 retries, but every now and then it will go to 6 or 7 retries, and the odd time we get a failure on the last retry, which is when it would be a nice feature to have one additional retry that ignores app level and at least gets us a successful backup, even if it is only a crash consistent and shows a warning status... Many times we eventually need to reboot the Exchange server to get it back on track, but sometimes not. It would just be really nice to have a successful backup in the end, especially with weekly or monthly offsite backups, which really are not good to have failures on.
Vitaliy S.
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Re: Enhancement Option for Veeam Scheduling for App Level Re

Post by Vitaliy S. »

Thank you for sharing your use case, guys!
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