Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1.0.423 Bugs/Feature Requests

[jcavalear]

I have been using the Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1 since January. I was previously using the free version of 2.0 on my machines. I am using this on a mix of physical servers and workstations. All of my agents are licensed and were updated automatically with the B& R console. I have everything being managed with my Veeam B & R console. I've come across the following limitations/bugs with the management of the Agents being used in Workstation mode in the console and I'm wondering if anyone has come up with any solutions, or if Veeam has plans to address?

* For my workstation jobs being managed by a Windows Agent Policy I do not have control over how many retries a job will attempt as I do with a VMware Backup job. I've had a couple of instances where a job will fail in the middle of the night and just keep on trying over and over until I arrive in the morning and address the issue. It would be nice to be able to limit to X tries and then alert me of the failure as I can with a Backup Job.

* There is no control over alerts for Windows Agent Policy jobs. I'm being alerted once a day at 8am for all alerts for my Workstations. I also cannot turn off alerts for "Notify on success". I get all alerts concerning agents no matter what the status at 8am sent to the account specified in the General Options section of the B & R Console

* Last Result and Next Run do not show up in B & R Console for Windows Agent Policy Jobs

* I cannot turn off Discovery on protection groups. The best I can do is limit it to one day a week. I backup several laptops that are not always on the network so it would be nice to be able to turn off discovery and manually run it when I know there is a new version of the client to deploy.

[Dima P.]

Hello and welcome to the community jcavalear.

For my workstation jobs being managed by a Windows Agent Policy I do not have control over how many retries a job will attempt

Veeam Agent for Windows performs retry cycle for 23 hours (basically the entire day is covered by retry cycle to ensue you get a restore point for the scheduled day). Can you please elaborate is that good enough or you still need to control the retry cycle?

There is no control over alerts for Windows Agent Policy jobs. I'm being alerted once a day at 8am for all alerts for my Workstations
...
Last Result and Next Run do not show up in B & R Console for Windows Agent Policy Jobs

True. Workstations might be shut down or hibernated at some point in time, laptops might be disconnected from the backup target completely. Due to these reasons Veeam B&R generates email report daily (based on the previously gathered stats for the last day). Due to the same next run time is not displayed.

I also cannot turn off alerts for "Notify on success". I get all alerts concerning agents no matter what the status at 8am sent to the account specified in the General Options section of the B & R Console

Will be fixed in next versions.

turn off Discovery on protection groups

Right click the protection group and hit disable. This will disable the periodic rescan job.

[jcavalear]

Dima, thank you for the answers to these behaviors I noticed. I hope this was the right place to report these types of issues and observations.

For the retry cycle on Agents, It would be nice to have the option to limit the number of retries in a similar manner that backup jobs can. I'm generally seeing an Agent job fail overnight when we're not monitoring the console and I'm not noticing that anything is wrong until the morning. With my Backup jobs after 3 retries I get an email stating the job failed, so even if I"m out of the office I'll know about a failure and can react if need be. For the Agents I have no such notification until I come in the next day and check my Failed jobs in the console. I've then been going into the backup job and un-checking the schedule until I resolve the issue, which in my case has usually been an issue with Veeam being able to contact the machine.

I just started administering Veeam in our environment not long before v.2.1 came out and enabled management by the B & R console. If I recall correctly when I was running un-managed agent v2.0 on my physical machines that they would still report to the B & R consolse successes and failures of jobs? Not sure why this functionality would be taken away in v2.1 with the advent of Protection Groups? I still have two "unmanaged" machines where I have not updated the client because they are going away and are not actively being backed up, and when I look in the Jobs view I see a "Next Run" entry for each, one is a date and one is marked as "<not scheduled>. The only difference I notice is that the v.2.0 Agents are defined as "Windows Agent Backup" and the v2.1 Agents are defined as "Windows Agent Policy".

The daily report for agents makes sense and isn't a big deal. Just wanted to make sure this was behaving as intended. I did have one occasion last week when I got a few reports from agents on laptops from issues other than from the previous day, like a week or two old. As an example, I got an email alert on 4/21 in my daily report at 8am and when I opened it up and looked at the error, the date of the job was 4/4. I was just curious why I'd see this alert again? This happened for 3 of my Agents on the same day,4/21, each reporting an error or warning from a previous date, not just the previous day (and not all from the same previous date)? I could attach a screen shot of what I'm talking about if that would help.

If I Disable the protection group that would not affect the backup job on that protection group? I only have an issue with some laptops that aren't always on the network so what I've done is limit the re-scans to once a week and I can live with the one alert each week if the person is on the road.

Thanks for your time. Joe