Feedback and Feature Requests

[knuther]

Hello, more like future releases.

Curious but how far out we talking i have a real need to replicate 300 odd vm's and am currently doing it with priority groups and would love to create replication / backup jobs based on View collections.

[Vitaliy S.]

This functionality is not going to be included to the next major release.

[gittings]

Sub-Categories
The ability to create sub-categories would help prevent the creation of many uneccessary categories.

For example. List a module then seperate the module by life-cycle ( dev, qa, prod )

[giacy]

The ability to put Vm's in multiple group. For instance a vm that host webserver for multiple customer. Or a Database that host db for multiple customer.

Bye.

Giacy.

[Vitaliy S.]

Actually, you can already do this even now, just create a secondary category and place the VM wherever you need. Thanks!

[stingray75]

We sync Veeam with our asset management database, so Veeam records the Application Name, Business Unit etc for every VM.

With v8 we're now using restricted views so teams can only see VM they're permissioned on in vCenter. This works great in the infrastructure view, but in Business View they can still see BV categories for which they have no VMs. For example, our Application Name category has 500+ apps in it but some users only have VMs for 20 of those apps. I'd like Veeam Monitor to only show the apps they're permissioned on (ie the ones with + next to the folder name) instead of showing all 500.

Thanks,

Matt

[Vitaliy S.]

Makes sense, I will ask our dev team to take a look a this scenario.

[jignpig]

I have been looking through the reports and found that the VM Configurations report seems close to what I'm looking for. I was previously looking into VMWare's IT Business Management product which is a pretty thorough solution for IT costing (chargeback/showback) but it is extremely expensive. If there was a way to start creating a page where we can enter some general costs, say an average cost for CPU, RAM , Storage so we can show our customers the cost of the IT services they consume would be a huge benefit. I'm in the public sector and it would help us greatly in providing cost metrics for project budgets or annual budgets.

[Shestakov]

Hello jignpig,

To say the truth we have chargeback/showback implementation in our roadmap, so your feedback is going to be really helpful.
Could you specify what kind of resources do you want to see in this kind of report(CPU, Memory, Storage, Network etc.)?
How do you charge them, for used, provisioned space or somehow else?

Thanks in advance!

[jignpig]

Unfortunately this is a new frontier for us to try and figure out what our true costs are. Our agency just recently centralized all IT budgets in my division, now everyone wants a piece of the budget for their own needs. My goal is to really show them the true costs of the environment because often they just think this stuff is free like water.

It’s really a two path approach. First, we need to start the process of showing our customers when they are over provisioned on resources and start reclaiming wasted resources. The nice thing about that is that we can correlate a cost per vCPU, RAM, Storage, etc. to the actual wasted resource.

So a message from us may be “ Hello Mr. customer, your virtual machine XXX is over provisioned on vCPUs and RAM. Our trend analysis shows that you could function optimally a X vCPUs and X amount of RAM, which would save you $xxx.xx dollars in your allocated budget.”

The next use case for us is really in the capacity planning/project management. We often have large system projects that require numerous virtual infrastructure resources and if we have costs in Veeam we would be able to tell project managers how much to budget for in their funding requests.

There’s plenty of other metrics that we’re thinking about such as software licensing costs, different costs for tiered equipment like all flash array storage versus slower cheap disk storage, disaster recovery service costs and so on. But for now we’re just going to take things slow.

[Vitaliy S.]

Thanks for the detailed feedback.

When you're talking about wasted resources, do you refer to the output of oversized VMs and Idle/Powered Off VMs reports? In other words, when we highlight unused resources for these VMs you would like to add $ amount and this should be enough to justify resource reallocation/reconfiguration (if needed)?

Speaking of project management, did you have a chance to review our "deployment projects" functionality? I'm just thinking whether adding chargeback capabilities to this engine would be exactly what you're looking for.

[kadirbakac]

Hello,
is there a way to increase the total number of categories over 25?
If not possible, it is a Feature Request from our customer.

[Vitaliy S.]

I don't see any reasons why not to increase this hard cap, but can you please elaborate on what is the use case? How did this customer categorize his VMs?

[kadirbakac]

They are serving online payment infrastructure to the banks and they categorize by customer and location.

[Vitaliy S.]

Ok, I will log this FR in our tracking system.

[Shestakov]

jignpig,
Glad to inform we have released Veeam v9.5 with new Chargeback reports.

[john.wood]

Not sure if this feature request thread is still taking requests.

Export to Excel/CSV
The format of the csv isn't very workable and requires a lot of cutting and pasting to get a basic column layout.

v9 Billing reports.
Haven't been able to find a way to only export the total used for each VM for the month, without breaking down per day?

[Shestakov]

Hi John,

Export to Excel/CSV
The format of the csv isn't very workable and requires a lot of cutting and pasting to get a basic column layout.

What format would you like to have for reports?

v9 Billing reports.
Haven't been able to find a way to only export the total used for each VM for the month, without breaking down per day?

So basically you need to know how much data VM backups took at particular day? You may use BACKUP INFRASTRUCTURE CUSTOM DATA report to get full backup size info for VMs.

[john.wood]

What format would you like to have for reports?

CSV is a fine output to work with, it just requires much manipulation once its exported to CSV, not all data is on the same sheets for example.

So basically you need to know how much data VM backups took at particular day? You may use BACKUP INFRASTRUCTURE CUSTOM DATA report to get full backup size info for VMs.

I'll look into that.
We have an external billing engine that takes a CSV file with (VMName, Data used (gb)) for the month. At this stage I've achieved this with a powershell output.

[Shestakov]

CSV is a fine output to work with, it just requires much manipulation once its exported to CSV, not all data is on the same sheets for example.

So you would like to have all data in the same page of .csv format?

[john.wood]

Business View Groups as a backup selection in VBR.

If I categorise all my servers into groups and categories it would a greatly beneficial if I could use those groups as a backup selection, like with VM Tags now.

[Shestakov]

Do you want to categorize backup servers themselves or other objects(proxies, repositories etc).
If first, how many backup servers do you have?
Thanks!

[john.wood]

I want to use Business View to create and categories of VM's I want to backup, then I want a VBR backup job to use this Business View for creating its VM list.

[Shestakov]

Hello John,
That makes total sense and we do have the feature in our plans.
For now you can propagate the categories and groups to vSphere tags and use the tags as VM containers for backup jobs.
Thanks!

[kotten]

Veeam v10.

Sorry if I have missunderstod something but these are some troubles I want to address to until the release of v10. I have not gone any veeam courses so if I misunderstood something or am not making sense, please be gentle.

---> Multiple tags per VM(possibility to import both) <---

We have a fairly large enviroment and multiple administrators with responsibility for a subsection of our enviroment. Some systems have multiple 'responsible administrators'. I create a tagcategory and import them and they are imported. However, only one of the users will be put in respective group. And that makes sense, imagine VMs with snapshots, you dont want the older than 30 days in the older than 7 days folder! But there should be an option somewhere that allows you to import multiple tags.

My vision.

Admin1
- serverA
- serverB
- serverC

Admin2
- serverA
- serverD
- serverF

And then ServerA would show up in both of these business views. This might seem "stupid" but then in v10 with multitenancy email reporting we could manage alarms to send to both. They could both take out reports on "their" servers. Because implementing something like this in the current alarm settings is a pain...

(There really should be a "baseline" and then base notification groups on content.)

A side note on another feature. When in the business view -> Configuration -> Import and Export when doing the import there should be a warning/checkbox to get the Object properties collection task from Veeam One Reporter. This would simplify for when setting things up and playing around with tags.

Thanks ,

[Shestakov]

Hello Kristoffer and welcome to the community!
We are planning big changes in Business View, including such features as "BV group admin" and support of multiple tags. Good to know the features are awaited.

A side note on another feature. When in the business view -> Configuration -> Import and Export when doing the import there should be a warning/checkbox to get the Object properties collection task from Veeam One Reporter. This would simplify for when setting things up and playing around with tags.

Do you mean that product need to notify that it may take time for changes to apply in Reporter?
Thanks!

[kotten]

Hello Kristoffer and welcome to the community!
We are planning big changes in Business View, including such features as "BV group admin" and support of multiple tags. Good to know the features are awaited.
Do you mean that product need to notify that it may take time for changes to apply in Reporter?
Thanks!

1. Yeah, that is going to be really nice.

2. Well the optimal would be when you run the import of tags to groups to have something like a checkbox "run reporter collection before import?" so that it collects the current tags before running the import. Does that make sense?

[Shestakov]

Got it. I guess it how the product actually works, but let me double-check. Have you experienced opposite behavior?
Thanks!

[kotten]

Got it. I guess it how the product actually works, but let me double-check. Have you experienced opposite behavior?
Thanks!

When I run the Tag import I would prefer to be prompted with if I want to run reporters Object properties collection task before this. The Object properties collection task runs via reporter on a scheduled basis(once a night for us) so when messing with tags and testing it would be nice to be prompted with this beforehand instead of having to manually log in to reporter after changing tags.

[Shestakov]

Understood. The collection task can be started manually, so we will consider adding the feature/notification.