Feature Request - Improve Media Pool View

[UT2015]

Hi,

the media pools views are a nice idea to manage all the offline medias online in a single view, but it is actually not really usable for us.

Here's some ideas for that view (Tape Infrastructure / Media Pools / Media Pool Increments e.g.), which could actually make it much more comfortable:

- Sorting is very nasty. Now that we added the media set number manually to the description of the media set, we indirectly have the ability to sort by media set. Why not displaying (at least optionally) the media set number of a tape as a different column, to let everybody easily sort by media set number?

- It is impossible to sort by two columns. Therefore it is not possible to sort the list of tapes e.g. by media set number and within a media set by the sequence number, which would actually be good.

- It would be nice to have a view of the media sets only. It's not really interesting (for us) to see every single tape all the time, but it would be very good, to have a good overview of all available media sets. In that case it would be clear, which backups actually exist (weekly, monthly, etc.) and which tapes can be reused/overwritten. We manage this all offline outside Veeam, because that view is not comfortable enough and GFS is not working good and stable enough for our needs.

- It would be good if the expiration time could be changed (probably increased) manually for different reasons.

Hopefully you think about some of those requests from an enduser point of view...

Best regards,
UT2015

[Shestakov]

Hi,

- Sorting is very nasty. Now that we added the media set number manually to the description of the media set, we indirectly have the ability to sort by media set. Why not displaying (at least optionally) the media set number of a tape as a different column, to let everybody easily sort by media set number?

Makes sense. Now tapes number is shown in brackets next to the Media pool name.

- It is impossible to sort by two columns. Therefore it is not possible to sort the list of tapes e.g. by media set number and within a media set by the sequence number, which would actually be good.

How many media pools do you have? What`s the average number of media sets in those pools?

- It would be nice to have a view of the media sets only. It's not really interesting (for us) to see every single tape all the time, but it would be very good, to have a good overview of all available media sets. In that case it would be clear, which backups actually exist (weekly, monthly, etc.) and which tapes can be reused/overwritten. We manage this all offline outside Veeam, because that view is not comfortable enough and GFS is not working good and stable enough for our needs.

Have you tried Veeam ONE tape reports? I like the idea though.

- It would be good if the expiration time could be changed (probably increased) manually for different reasons.

There is an option to make a tape protected in 1 click. Do you have a need to extend protection for X days/weeks?
Thanks!

[UT2015]

Makes sense. Now tapes number is shown in brackets next to the Media pool name.

I don't get you. Next to the media pool name in brackets is shown the number of tapes in that pool? The media set number is not shown anywhere by default (at least we didn't see it anywhere) - we added it manually to the media set name in the properties of the media pool.

How many media pools do you have? What`s the average number of media sets in those pools?

We have only one media pool containing approx. 200 tapes.

Have you tried Veeam ONE tape reports? I like the idea though.

No, we are not using Veeam ONE. The sense of the media pool view currently seems only to be listing all the tapes of that pool, which is quite useless (at least for us). It could be improved to be a real media set managing view...

There is an option to make a tape protected in 1 click. Do you have a need to extend protection for X days/weeks?

We have the need to change the expiration time manually to protect our monthly backups longer than the weekly and the yearly longer than the monthly. GFS has not worked well enough for us (different reasons), therefore we would like to manage our weekly/monthly/yearly backups in the media pool view. Currently this is not possible, we manage them completely offline.

Best regards,
UT2015

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the details.

We have only one media pool containing approx. 200 tapes.

And how many media sets do you have in that media pool? Trying to figure out if second sorting parameter would be helpful.

We have the need to change the expiration time manually to protect our monthly backups longer than the weekly and the yearly longer than the monthly. GFS has not worked well enough for us (different reasons), therefore we would like to manage our weekly/monthly/yearly backups in the media pool view. Currently this is not possible, we manage them completely offline.

Could you explain why GFS Media pool didn`t work for you?
There had been a popular workaround before Tape GFS feature was released.

[UT2015]

And how many media sets do you have in that media pool?

I can't tell you, because it's not possible to see it in that view.

Could you explain why GFS Media pool didn`t work for you?

We had several problems, as described here and in the following posts. To sum it up:
- GFS without daily increments is not good
- the configuration of the starting time of a GFS job is impractical, it would be much easier, if it could directly start after a backup to disk job, just like other tape jobs
- GFS does not work correctly in combination with Endpoint backups (described here)
- a GFS Job failed and did not retry as expected, known problem (described here)
- the retry of the failed GFS Job happened one week later resulting in completely broken backups (the retried part of the backup resulted in weekly instead of monthly backup, etc.)

The GFS idea is good, but it is way too hard to configure correctly and it is impossible to fix a broken backup if there occured some error during backup. The risk is too high for us, we do not trust GFS. Therefore we are not using it anymore.

Best regards,
UT2015

[Shestakov]

I see, that all are known issues and some of them is to be repaired in the upcoming release.
Do you use the mentioned workaround with separate media pools for Monthly/Weekly etc retention?
As for UI suggestions, we will discuss them within the team.
Thanks!

[lyapkost]

Hi, UT2015.

First of all, the idea of GFS is a long-term storage of backups, that's why GFS-job makes only one daily backup with no increments. It's the first point. Then, the start time.

the configuration of the starting time of a GFS job is impractical, it would be much easier, if it could directly start after a backup to disk job, just like other tape jobs

Well, it is already easy, just schedule GFS-job to the day when backup job starts and it will copy the newest backup in several minutes after it is produced. And even if the source job failed for some reason, the GFS-job will copy the latest backup next day. So one may always be sure to have a backup on tape for the chosen date/interval.

Lots of problems including those you've described above, are solved in the upcoming major release. We here in R&D worked hard to improve the functionality and to get rid of troubles and annoying issues which existed before, for tape GFS was the new feature in 9.0. So I hope you may finally find our developed in v. 9.5 GFS algorithm reliable and suitable for your needs.

[UT2015]

Do you use the mentioned workaround with separate media pools for Monthly/Weekly etc retention?

Not yet. How should the weekly job be configured to not backup when the montly job is active? In the monthly job I can choose e.g. first Saturday of a month. And if I choose every Saturday in the weekly job, those jobs will both run on the same day, won't they?

[veremin]

I believe this is only possible via PowerShell scripting. Weekly job should have a pre-job activity that will check whether it's the first Saturday of the month and act accordingly (skip execution of weekly job). Thanks.

[Shestakov]

Not yet. How should the weekly job be configured to not backup when the montly job is active? In the monthly job I can choose e.g. first Saturday of a month. And if I choose every Saturday in the weekly job, those jobs will both run on the same day, won't they?

Yes, that`s an issue of the workaround. Besides pre-job script option, you can schedule jobs to run on different days, say weeklies on Saturday and monthlies on the last Sunday. Another option is to have weekly backups only and protect every 4th media set from rewriting manually.
Thanks!

[UT2015]

...that's not really a good way. As long as it is not possible to manage that correctly and comfortable in Veeam we will not use it. This is our long term backup which is important for our company. We have to make sure that it is working flawlessly and is organized correctly - this is from our point of view definately not possible with Veeam today.

[Shestakov]

I understand your point.
By the way, we`ve released RTM of v9.5, so the newest product version going to be generally available in 2 weeks and it will include new tape GFS features as was discussed above.
Thanks!

[UT2015]

As for UI suggestions, we will discuss them within the team.

Have you discussed the UI suggestions mentioned in the first post? Current version still has none of the mentioned improvements...

Best regards,
UT2015

[winnt]

Hello, as a work-around, this post describes a script that will export all tape information into a CSV, then you can search and sort within Excel.
You will need access to run queries on the Veeam SQL Server.

https://forums.veeam.com/powershell-f26 ... ml#p280337

Hope it helps.