VeeamOn 2017 - Feature Request - Virtual Lab/Surebackup

[theta12]

First off, is there someplace we can go to look at all open feature requests for a product or is hunting and pecking through the search feature the only way to do it?

Somewhat piggybacking off of another open feature request (veeam-backup-replication-f2/surebackup- ... 41973.html), can we have a virtual lab or surebackup option that keeps the lab up 'UNTIL we choose to take it down' or at least specify a number of days before going offline'? I'm not talking about the option to leave the surebackup job running after it does it's checks. This job is completely dependent upon a single service running on the server and if that service goes down, it deletes your entire lab. This is more of a option to where we need our app people to test something out and it may take several days or possibly a week for them to finish testing all of the changes. All of the pieces are in place to do it with the features currently available in the product today. I've been burned twice by the VB&R server getting rebooted and it wiping out the entire lab. I want to boot the lab up and keep it running independent of the backup service. Boot this lab and then keep your hands off of it until I send the command to take down the lab.

[foggy]

You can manually restore the required VMs into a virtual lab environment for longer-term testing, like it is discussed here. Is that what you're talking about?

[haslund]

An alternative to what foggy suggested is to simply create a replication job with no schedule, run it once then utilize as source for your SureBackup. Whenever you need to update all VMs just stop the SureBackup job, run the replication job and start the SureBackup job - just make sure to put all the VMs into an application group and tick the box to keep them running.

[theta12]

Yes, Foggy, that's what I was looking for, but without having to do all of the manual restores and connecting them to the proxy myself. That was the work-around I had already figured out how to do to bypass the reliance on the surebackup job taking my lab down. It would seem like this wouldn't be that hard of a thing to do automatically since Veeam is already doing all of this behind the scenes already. Maybe surebackup boots everything up, but then hands the lab off to another process so that another backup job wouldn't interfere with the lab?

[foggy]

Since VMs in the virtual lab run directly from the backup file, this might be not possible, since corresponding backup files will be used by the backup job (depending on the backup method). VMs have to be migrated to another storage anyway.