Hello! We are one of the oldest Nutanix partners around, and an old Veeam partner as well. We are trying to voice concern by sharing what we are hearing and seeing from customers on the front lines. We have expressed this to Nutanix reps and managers on a few occasions by asking for more cooperation on the AHV Proxy product, and we have spoken to multiple Nutanix reps who used to work at Veeam as well. But this really falls on Veeam to develop their product.
Presently, more than 50% of Nutanix customers are running Nutanix AHV. This is largely driven by the fact that AHV is free, so eliminating vSphere licensing costs is big incentive since AHV functionality and compatibility has gotten on-par with vSphere for the past few years now. The biggest pain point was and still is appliance VMs, but more and more vendors are getting onboard with providing an AHV-compatible appliance. Cisco offers some of their appliances on AHV already, so you have big names and even mid-sized players providing compatibility which means the ice is broken and melted. Now with Nutanix clusters being available on ERATE we see this exciting change driving many new clients to Nutanix, and existing clients to consider migrating to AHV on their next refresh. This is because one requirement of getting ERATE to cover Nutanix is that it must be running AHV, not other hypervisors such as VMware or Hyper-V. Which is fine in our book.
The bump in the road we are trying to avoid is this:
Clients will want to continue to run Veeam because it’s one solution to manage physical servers, VMware VMs, AHV VMs, Hyper-V VMs, and files. We already have an increasing number of clients migrate to Nutanix AHV only to find their backup jobs functionality in Veeam has regressed. Additionally, now clients must open this browser based AHV Proxy to manage AHV jobs, which is an inferior experience both in terms of functionality and UI (Read: painful on the eyes). Clients often decide that staying with AHV is worth it because of the massive cost savings. But staying with this AHV management experience is sub-par compared to their previous Veeam experience and they start looking at other backup options. To pick on one in particular example is that the scheduler is great in the B&R console. You can manually type the time and type AM or PM. The Proxy has an ugly radial dial to choose the time, and you cannot choose less than 15-minute increments. This is not a good look. Who decided to reinvent that wheel? (pun intended)
We have already heard the rumblings from AHV clients complaining about this proxy used to manage AHV jobs. We have spoken to a few Veeam account reps and support reps, as well as Nutanix, and we understand that there is a lot of work on the back end regarding APIs and integration to provide the same level of functionality. But it can be done. (Looking at Veeam’s competitors that backup AHV)
That said we don’t want to only pass along the growing number of complaints from the front lines, here is also what we can suggest Veeam can do to help smooth out these bumps in the road and make a better experience for us as a Veeam and Nutanix partner to keep selling Veeam to AHV customers. Note, these are *NOT* suggestions on how to make the "Nutanix for AHV Proxy" experience better because we do not want to perpetuate using the Nutanix for AHV Proxy.
Step 1: Start by folding in job management into the B&R Console, get rid of the AHV browser for job management and never look back.
An AHV Proxy performing the actual back-end job management is necessary. Okay, we get it, fine. But a separate browser should not have to be invoked to create and manage backup jobs. As a compromise to get us started we would recommend to at least keep users in the B&R Console while developers work on adding in features. In fact, you are already doing this! For example, if you try to create a backup copy job for an AHV backup job, the “continuous backup” option is greyed out, giving you only the “Periodic backup” option. Great, do that more! (Screenshot below)
Keeping clients in the B&R Console and away from that AHV Proxy web browser will help appease most people and keep them patient. Just leave functions not available grayed out, if you can do that then there will be no reason to manage jobs from the AHV proxy web browser. From what we understood this is a product that was developed by a separate company outside of Veeam and it really shows.
Step 2: Work on aligning the feature set to match current backup job functionality. Want a list of examples? Here you go:
-Storage guard corruption maintenance. (No, I don’t want to create a backup-copy job, I want maintenance in the job natively like other Veeam jobs)
-GFS retention policy. (Weekly, monthly, yearly)
-Retention Days or Points. (Presently it is retention points only)
-Secondary target integration within the job wizard.
-Use the same logic for the JOB NAME for creating backup folder names in the repo instead of AHV VM NAME. (Presently an AHV job ignores job names in repo folders, appends “_Backup” to the name, and called duplicates “_Backup_#”. We don’t want that, please name the folder to match the job name)
-Automatic scheduled backup of the AHV proxy configuration. (Presently it is a manual only process to save configs to repos. Only snapshots are automated. I do not want config backups dependent on the environment Veeam is protecting, this should be obvious)
-Allow Forever-Forward AHV jobs to be on a scaled-out repo without an Active full. Or at the very least allow this warning to be suppressed: (Screenshot below)
-To provide another GUI issue this proxy introduced; When scrolling jobs in AHV proxy, (and for job Pop-up) the top action buttons are not pinned at the top of the page, making us scroll all the way back up and down when editing long lists of jobs. This is not an issue in the B&R console.
There are lots more, these are just some examples.
Hopefully I have made my case to eliminate job management in this AHV Proxy. Brining job creating and management home to B&R console greatly would help avoid the ire of customers while developers continue working on aligning features, that is why we ask for that to happen first. The last thing we want is to wait until years later some double-digit version of this proxy finally bring an experience parallels to what we have now in B&R v11a. Big thanks to all the hardworking Veeam support reps that have continued to keep our clients rolling over the years, including Veeam's Nutanix AHV team!
PS: Shout out to GOSTEV! We all really looked forward to those knowledge drops on Sundays, so we really miss them. I’m sure we can speak for a lot of us by saying we hope his blog comes back soon!