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soncscy
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No "Location" for proxies -- Feature Request?

Post by soncscy »

Hello,

I was working with a client on automating a few features for a multi-regional environment (i.e., datacenters in different geographical locations), and I came to the sudden and surprising realization that proxies don't have the option for Locations like virtually every other Veeam infrastructure item.

For normal backups, this isn't an issue because we can isolate the proxies, but for Veeamzip this causes some problems, and this is a surprisingly popular feature for many of my clients

Maybe this isn't for public consumption, but why can't we set Locations for proxies? Is this maybe something on the horizon? I was able to hack out a solution for virtual proxies only, but it's not as reliable or automated as I'd like (in brief, I do Find-VBRViEntity based on the proxy GetHost() method output and try a few permutations of hostname to see if the result is found in the added Hypervisors, and failback to manually picking what proxies to include if we can't get a match from the cmdlet. All VMs on the host should inherit the Location as I understand it)

Looking at the available cmdlets and options, I think I understand we're supposed to use the proxy affinity feature of repositories to do the same task, but this isn't always a black and white issue, as if I get it correctly, the source proxy handles the deduplication, meaning that the full VM data might be sent across WAN for multi-regional environments if the wrong proxy is chosen. Trying to automate the one-off tasks is a challenge because of this. Sometimes we end up in situations where there is a "lesser of two evils" choice, and a region doesn't have a local repo and we need to transverse WAN, but one proxy is less-bad than another.

So, too long of a post, but short version:

1. Is there a Locations feature for proxies that I'm missing?
2. If "no", is this on the roadmap?
3. Is there a more convenient workaround besides using Find-VBRViEntity?

Thanks for any feedback you can offer.
HannesK
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Re: No "Location" for proxies -- Feature Request?

Post by HannesK » 1 person likes this post

Hello,
Locations labels that have no influence on functionality. The goal of locations is that customers get a warning, when they accidentally copy data to the "wrong" country (legal issues) https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=100

That's why proxies don't support a location. They don't store data.
For normal backups, this isn't an issue because we can isolate the proxies, but for Veeamzip this causes some problems
so you have the issue, that VeeamZip picks the wrong proxy (while you can define a proxy for a backup job). Did I understand the issue correctly? (then the feature request would be +1 in post326429.html?hilit=veeamzip%20proxy#p326429)

About alternatives... yes, proxy affinity is one of them. Maybe also "export backups" instead of "VeeamZip" could give the same result. https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=100 - that does not involve any proxies and also results in a VBK.

Best regards,
Hannes
soncscy
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Re: No "Location" for proxies -- Feature Request?

Post by soncscy »

HI Hannes,

Thanks for the feedback.

I __think__ I get the idea of Locations, but frankly I feel it's a bit of an overt self-restriction. Script-wise, being able to easily tag where a proxy is just is very useful for me. Automating job creation, the aforementioned Veeamzip issue (I've not had such luck with your linked workarounds, but thank you anyways), for me it's just a no-brainer to include location on the proxies also as I'm not sure what the downside is of doing it. The use-cases I have are of course all edge-cases, so I'll live with that, but I guess consider it a humble request to extend the functionality. I'd love to have a nice way to just tag __all__ infrastructure items in Veeam so that automation is just that much more convenient.

Outside of proxy affinity and manual proxy groups within Powershell/code that works based on REST results, I'm not sure how to effectively manage proxies in multi-regional environments.
veremin
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Re: No "Location" for proxies -- Feature Request?

Post by veremin »

Quick though: if you're looking for a way to tag existing resources and read them afterwards via PowerShell, may be you can use a description field for that - most of managed resources (jobs, proxy, servers, etc.) have it. Thanks!
soncscy
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Re: No "Location" for proxies -- Feature Request?

Post by soncscy »

Hello Vladimir,

Thank you for your response, and indeed I've resorted to this at times, but it feels clumsy. The -contains parameter I've noticed is not always great with PS (it __really__ does not like \n :/) but it does work, so mostly I can get it done.

I just think it would be a low hanging fruit for future versions for a feature that is otherwise really great :) If data storage regulations from GDPR are really the only reason it's not included on all infrastructure items, it just feels like a weird justification for not adding it to all components.
veremin
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Re: No "Location" for proxies -- Feature Request?

Post by veremin »

Sure, but in reality of limited time and R&D resources, we have to invest them wisely to cover only specific (most demanded) use cases.

So, even what on paper looks like a tiny enhancement might mean additional development and testing efforts that sometimes simply cannot be justified.

Anyway, thank you for your feedback; we will keep it in mind, while working on our next product releases.
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