Attaching VMM clouds to a job

[Marco2G]

Hello everybody

We are in the middle of replacing our "legacy backup" with Veeam. I have to say, I expected to be happier with the result.

One problem I am having is the way you can attach VMs to a job. For vSphere, we just used the folder structure, which enables me to create a job per customer and also ensures that newly created VMs automatically get added to the right backup job even when I am not the one creating the VM.

In Hyper-V, this just seems impossible. As far as I can see, the only options I have is to add hosts, clusters, cluster folders, CSVs and single VMs.

- Adding per host makes little sense considering Live Migration.
- Per cluster and cluster folder leaves me with big, unwieldy job sizes.
- Per VM makes it so I have to manually add each new VM, putting us at risk of forgetting to back up a VM.
- Per CSV is what I have at the moment but that leads to the CSV entering paused state. Also, the job size is still too large for my liking and application aware processing is a veritable bitch to configure. Not to mention that the customers demanding encryption are not satisfied with sharing an encryption password.

So my question is why it's not possible to add VMs based on the cloud they're attached to in VMM? I have attached all hosts and clusters via the VMM server so that information should be available to Veeam.

Regards,

Marco

[Shestakov]

Hello Marco,
Thanks for the detailed feedback.

- Per cluster and cluster folder leaves me with big, unwieldy job sizes.

There is an option to Exclude Objects from the Backup Job, so you can choose objects(VMs, hosts) you don`t need to make the job smaller.
By the way, I heard that in the upcoming MS Windows Server 2016 are going to be VM resource pools and folders. Thanks.

[Marco2G]

I realise that. But you know what happens when you have ten customers on the same cluster and do what you proposed?

You get ten jobs on which you have to exclude 90% of all VMs. Different ones on each job. A lot of work.
Someone makes a new VM -> You have to add an exclusion to nine jobs.
A new customer needs VMs -> You have to add a job excluding everything else and add the new VMs to all other jobs
Someone makes a new VM and doesn't tell you -> it automatically gets pulled into all ten jobs. You suddenly store ten copies of the same VM.

While I'll grant you that it is a workaround, it is in no way an acceptable solution.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Marco,

Your feedback makes total sense. The lack of other containers in Hyper-V does have an effect on backup job management. Let's see what improvements the next version of Hyper-V brings.

BTW, how do you group VMs from different clients (apart from backup job configuration) right now?

Per CSV is what I have at the moment but that leads to the CSV entering paused state.

Can you please elaborate on this?

Thanks!

[KennethLarsen]

yeah nothing..

And thier powershell dont work either...

veeam is ok, but administration of it with a hyper-v platform just plains sux..

[nmdange]

Since Veeam can pull VM information from SCVMM, I think it would be a nice feature to be able to use VMM clouds in backup jobs.

[kritzinger]

+1

I also miss the feature to organize VM's in SCVMM. Usinig Clouds would be a nice workaround.

[jkan]

Is there any workaround to work with SCVMM cloud?