Feature Request: Backup Proxy Groups

[david.buchanan]

Hi Support,

I'd like to suggest a feature which I think would make management of backup proxy's a lot quicker (If anyone has a way to do this now please let me know).

We have multiple sites which have anywhere from 2 to 10 proxies.

To ensure we don't get any odd behavior with a proxy from one site doing anything in another I manually specify in each job which proxies they are allowed to use (We've had this happen a number of times).

This means that when I deploy a new proxy I need to go through each job for that site and select it as a proxy it's allowed to use.

It would be great if I could create a Proxy group and select this for the job. I could then add and remove proxys from the group instead of having to do it for each job.

Thanks
David.

[PTide]

Hi,

I believe that we already have a request for the feature which could help you to control many jobs' behaviour with a few clicks. Anyway proxy grouping is still a valid feature request.

Thank you for your feedback!

[david.buchanan]

Thanks PTide, I'll take a look.

Regards,
David.

[david.buchanan]

I've read the request, it's a little different to mine but still working along the same lines. As mentioned in that post, changes to jobs once they are created can be quite time consuming, especially when you have more than 300 jobs to manage like I do. One simple change means I may need to edit anywhere from 1 to 50 jobs. Some kind of grouping or policy based system is definitely required for Veeam. I love Veeam, it is far superior than the previous product we used, so anything added to make management easier is a welcome change.

[fcardarelli]

David, I agree with your feature request, two days ago i have requested to Support the same, and they told me to post here.
It would be very usefull for me too, because we have many locations and every time we create a new proxy we have to edit all jobs related to that location.
I was thinking about PROXY CLUSTERS or PROXY LOCATIONS or PROXY GROUPS that are attached to a cluster or location or group of vms.

Another idea I have in mind related to this (if it would be available), is that you can set proxy mode depending on its location, because we have some locations that we use NBD and the same proxy for others to use HOT-ADD. In this case its configured as hot-add and we have to wait the proxy to failover to nbd.

Have you had any news from support about this feature request?

Regards.
Francisco.-

[foggy]

Not exactly this, but Veeam B&R v9.5 will provide the ability to specify proxy/repository affinity rules.

[Iain_Green]

Hi,

We would like to have the ability to manage the proxies at the proxy level rather than just with the backup job.
Ideally a proxy group ability would be nice.

For example we could group a number of proxies together and assign them to specific backups.

Currently we have to manually edit each job (or powershell) to select which proxies to use. We can't just leave them to automatic as based on the rules for proxy selection we could end up having jobs selecting Proxies that are not set up for certain environments being selected. this would cause the backups to fail.

[Gostev]

Hi, have you considered using the Proxy Affinity feature of 9.5?

[Iain_Green]

I have now...

Unfortunately all be it gives more flexibility to managing hosts it still does not provide a simple way of excluding a proxy. Now instead of editing multiple jobs I would have to edit multiple affinity rules.
In my scenario I simply need to say this proxy needs to work with this repository and no other.

[veremin]

I think simple PS script updating affinity rules for all backup repositories (by the way, how many do you have?) would answer your requirements. Thanks.

[Iain_Green]

Why not the ability to do so from the properties of the proxy itself?

[ksanders99]

We back up two vCenters, each with a cluster in one of two geographic locations. If Proxy selection is left to Automatic, the job will sometimes pick a proxy that's located in a different vCenter's cluster, and since they do not share storage, default to network backup. I'd like some type of grouping to limit backup jobs to use a set of proxies without having to go into the "Multiple Proxies" list and check each one individually.

thanks,
Keith

[skrause]

I too think this would be a good idea. Would cut down on the amount of time it takes for proxy selection at the very least.

[tsightler]

Note that this is already somewhat possible using the proxy affinity option since it's likely that if you have two geographic locations you also have different repositories at each one, so you can associate proxies at each site with the repositories at each site. It's not quite the same, and doesn't cover every possible case that proxy groups would be useful for, but it works really well and is available in the product today.

[Fred_vBrain]

Hi all,

one nice addition to Proxy servers would be if you could create groups. Currently you can select proxy servers in the backup job or do a automatically selection. Sometimes because of the amount of proxy servers it would be nice to have groups of proxy servers like "all proxies doing DIrectSAN", "all proxies for hotadd" or maybe "all proxies from site A". Currently I don't know how big Veeam environments could be regarding amount of proxy servers.

Cheers,
Fred

[odge]

Am I the only person out there who finds themselves clicking different proxies from time to time when instead having a Proxy group (where a proxy might also belong to more than one group), would allow you to configure jobs to use a proxy group, and simply maintain who is in the group.

[tdewin]

Not sure if it will match your use case but have you considered proxy affinity? You can assign certain proxies to a repository so if your job targets that repository, it will only use this set of proxies
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95

[odge]

Ah, yes, let rephrase my question a bit better

[odge]

Am I the only person out there who finds themselves clicking different proxies from time to time when instead having a Proxy group (where a proxy might also belong to more than one group), would allow you to configure jobs to use a proxy group, and simply maintain who is in the group.

Not sure if it will match your use case but have you considered proxy affinity? You can assign certain proxies to a repository so if your job targets that repository, it will only use this set of proxies
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95

as pointed to by tdewin, "why not use proxy affinity on the backup repository".

I'm actually finding this happens on cross site maintenance regarding replication more than anything else, we cant use "automatic" because then we see often see a proxy from the opposing site using NBD to this site (maybe the existing proxies are busy), so we need to lockdown which proxies can be used for source and destination. But if you have different jobs doing different things, it all adds up to a lot of maintenance to change a proxy configuration.

One might jump to the conclusion of - why have so many different jobs--- well, different times, different requirements (like Quiescing can only be set for a whole job, and not per VM/exclusions etc), different retentions and what not.

[SE-1]

Hello

Is this something that would be available soon?

We managed different vCenters with one veeam server, and we use different proxy's for each vCenter
It would be nice to have a feature where you would be able to group your proxy's for example by tag, then be able to select all jobs and push the proxy group you want to use.

We have around 100 jobs, and it is very time consuming to adjust this each time.

[Gostev]

There are not too many request for proxy groups, especially since we introduced proxy affinity option, so it's not on a short-term roadmap... have you thought of scripting this with PowerShell to at least automate those adjustments meanwhile?