FEATURE REQUEST: Offline VM Backup

[Poweruser]

Because VSS is nice, it does not work in every case.
Also - if downtime is okay - you want to make a very safe Backups without risking online VSS Problems.

Therefore its necessary to add this feature:
- Backup job should be able to Shutdown VMs (Hyper-V) in predefined order (so Active Directory Domain Controller is shutdown after Fileserver, after SQL)
- Backup job should be able to restart VMs which have been shutdown before in reverse order or just by using the Hyper-V restart wait-times.

[Dima P.]

Hello Poweruser.

When saying tape backup jobs are you referring to File to tape jobs? Backup to tape works with backup files on disk, so there is no need to touch the production VM. Thanks.

[Poweruser]

Scenario is always:
Windows 2016 Datacenter Hyper-V Host running n VMs (Guests).
B&R running with all Agents, etc. on Host.
So Host should shutdown all VMs obeying the right order,
Backup all VM Files (VHD, Config) direct to Tape (Repository optional),
restart all VMs obeying right order (reverse).

[Dima P.]

So you are saying that you protect your Hyper-V host on a file level via File to tape job? You could use Veeam Agent to protect the either host (that eliminates the need to shutdown the either host due to VSS integration) or you can tape out the backup files of your VMs produced by Veeam B&R via backup to tape job.

[Poweruser]

I do both. In first i dont need the repository, as i prefer full backups to tape only. (if it is possible....)

Now there are 2 backup jobs.
First job does an online VSS Backup of all running VMs. So i can backup it during runtime.
Second job does an offline Backup of all VMs with VHD, Configs, etc, AND backing up local filesystem files of the host system to disc.
Acutally i can do it by scripting powershell and backing up the files which i selected manually.
This is dangerous, and users (admins) are lazy, so it would be much easier, if veeam would do this job for me.

a) shutdown vms in right order
b) copy VMs without the need to select files manually (veeam should do the selection for you as it does the online/vss way, means selecting host or vmname only, thats all)
c) restart vms in right reverse order

So its just the same as its implemented right now, with a small change, that there is a pre and post batch which shutdowns and restarts the vms.
yes i can do this by scripting, but its very dangerous if you oversee sth.