Surebackup not meeting my needs

[tomnewman]

I've been told I'm a Neanderthal for still doing full periodic backups so, amongst the other suggested checks, I'm trying to get Surebackup to work in my environment. I'm new to it so I may well be missing something or misunderstanding something but there doesn't seem to be a very straightforward way to achieve what I need in my environment.

We Currently run 16 VMs (mostly Windows but a few Linux). They run in three different VLANs but they all use one one Virtual switch (VLAN id is set on the Network Adapter properties for wach VM). This seems to be my first problem because, if my understanding is correct, I can't setup an Isolated Network for each of the VLANs in one Virtual Lab because they are all running on the same virtual switch and this is not allowed. The only way to make this work is to have a separate Virtual Lab for each VLAN and then run (at least) three different Surebackup jobs (for servers in each VLAN). Is my understanding correct?

When I setup my first SureBackup job I did it as an application group which worked fine with a few test servers. However, I realised that what I actually needed was Linked Jobs because I would run out of memory checking more than a few servers as they aren't shut down until the whole job finishes. Would be nice to have the option to change this on a server by server basis.

So, I changed to Linked Jobs but there seems to be no way to exclude servers that were included in a backup. Am I wrong? I keep thinking that there must be a way but I can't find it. I can think of several reasons why you would want to exclude VMs but particularly in my environment I have to exclude VMs that aren't in the same VLAN as the Virtual Lab or they fail heartbeat and ping (wrong VLAN).

I could have three separate backups, one each for all the servers in the same VLAN but I would lose deduplication benefits compared to my current backup of all the VMs.

The only way I seem to be able to achieve what I want is to setup a Virtual Lab for each VLAN and then run a whole bunch of Surebackups each one using an Application Group containing one or two VMs. Surely there is a better way!

[skrause]

You can use multiple if you use Advanced Single/Multi Host when you set up your proxy appliance.

[tomnewman]

You can use multiple if you use Advanced Single/Multi Host when you set up your proxy appliance.

I don't believe you can. You can create multiple entries for the same production virtual switch with different VLAN IDs but the Isolated Network can only have one VLAN ID, so when you change it in one Network Mapping it changes it for all of them. As the Isolated Network has to be in the same VLAN as the VM you are testing then I can only test VMs in one VLAN.

[nefes]

Is there a reason why you want to have different VLANs inside lab? Is it for isolation machines from each other, or for any other goal?
You can create several isolated networks inside lab, and map each VLAN in production into different network in lab. As soon as you don't need a lot of them, it can work in one Virtual Lab.

[tomnewman]

Is there a reason why you want to have different VLANs inside lab?

Good point, no there isn't. But servers in different VLANs are in different subnets so when I run a Surebackup I get "Ping test will be skipped because VM is not connected to any private network".

I can't work out how to make those servers available to ping, script etc

[nefes]

You can do the mapping following way:
Prod (VLAN 1) -> Isolated 1
Prod (VLAN 2) -> Isolated 2
Prod (VLAN 3) -> Isolated 3
Add 3 networks to lab, 1st for Isolated 1, 2nd for Isolated 2, 3rd for Isolated 3.
After that each isolated network card should be configured with network settings of corresponding production VLAN.

[tomnewman]

Thanks for the suggestion, that is exactly what I would like to do but can't with my environment.

Prod (VLAN 1), Prod (VLAN 2), Prod (VLAN 3), all use the same 40 Gb Virtual Switch. You can only have one Isolated Network per Production Network interface (Virtual Switch) so I can't do what you suggest. I also tried adding additional vNICs in the Network Settings but you can only have one vNIC per Isolated Network so that isn't a solution either.

This didn't used to be a problem, prior to 9.5 you could add additional vNICs but Veeam removed the ability, see vmware-vsphere-f24/surebackup-and-multi ... 40191.html

The reason given was "In fact, the behavior was indeed changed in v9.5. As mentioned above, adding multiple vNICs with different network settings for a single isolated network was mistakenly allowed in previous versions (in fact such configuration worked in some specific cases only) and was intentionally disabled in v9.5". Would have been nice if Veeam fixed it rather than removing it!

[nefes]

You can only have one Isolated Network per Production Network interface (Virtual Switch) so I can't do what you suggest.

Actually, you can have multiple of them, if VLANs are different. You are referring to VMware topic, where VLAN is tied to virtual switch, so all machines in one network are connected to the same VLAN.
For Hyper-V it is different, so Virtual Lab also works differently. Here are screenshots:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tpjmlu1zn4butn4/HV_SB1.png
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mur0yerq2k6bbxf/HV_SB2.png

[tomnewman]

Thanks for the info nefes. You are quite correct.

Have to say I've found this a frustrating and very time consuming process. The Veeam documentation doesn't cover this and trying to find the information online has been impossible. I might have been able to work this out myself through trial and error if it wasn't for the 'isolated network' field that appears as a dropdown but is also - if you know - an editable field. Whoever thought it was a good idea to totally ignore GUI convention needs to experience the pain I've been through!

[vmstrata]

I agree with you guys. This is ridicules. How does it make sense to have multiple isolated networks with the same vlan?
This Surebackup was not thought out properly and coded properly.