SQL Plugin Management

[Airless]

Apologies if this is not the right place for Plugin Questions but its not obvious where to post them.

I am using the SQL Plugin in unmanaged mode (DBA Teams create and manage backups through SSMS).
The issue is I have alot of Plugins installed across the Enterprise, but no easy way to manage them. Normally a Protection group would do the trick, but you can't use a Protection Group in unmanaged mode.

So does anyone have any neat way of managing them ? How to keep tabs on them, and their version ? How to upgrade them in one easy go when VBR is upgraded ?

Thanks

Phil

[PetrM]

Hi Phil and Welcome to Veeam R&D Forums!

Currently, the plug-in is available only in standalone mode, but managed mode, which includes protection group and backup policy creation, and enhanced reporting is on our roadmap with the highest priority. We are already working on it, but I cannot provide ETA.

Thanks!

[Airless]

Many Thanks @PetrM.

So does this mean that I need to track them myself (in a spreadsheet say) and upgrade them manually for now ?

Thanks

Phil

[PetrM]

Yes, each plug-in needs to be upgraded manually, or a script can be used to upgrade plug-ins in unattended mode.

Thanks!

[Airless]

Many thanks indeed. I will use unattended mode.

[PetrM]

Hi Phil,

Just out of curiosity, could you please share the basic sizing information about your infrastructure? How many SQL servers or clusters do you have in total, and how many databases are on each server?

Thanks!

[Airless]

Hi PetrM,

I'm actually not able to share that due to company policy. Apologies if thats not very helpful.
But for anyone interested in this thread, I can also see another drawback to the unattended mode, and that is the retention is far less granular. If you want 1 full for 4 weeks and then 1 full per month for 6 months, I understand you can't be that granua and instead I will need to go the full fat SQL protection group route because also that way I can manage the plugins easily too.

[PetrM]

Got it.

GFS retention policy for SQL plug-in is a high priority request, and it is on the roadmap, but I cannot share an ETA.

Thanks!

[MJL1495]

Hi Team,
We have a scenario wherein there are approx. 100 SQL servers configured for backups via the SQL Plugin. Since the plugin installation is done on the respective SQL servers, the details, such as version of these plugins are not visible on the VBR console. Is there any way to extract such details through the VBR server?

Regards,
Mel

[Mildur]

Hello Melroy,

Welcome to our forum! I have moved your topic to a similar discussion.

As far as I know, it is currently not possible to report on the version for standalone plugins on the backup server.
However, we are working on making our SQL Plugin manageable by the backup server, which would potentially provide functionality to report on installed versions.

Best,
Fabian

[JGranden]

[Feature Request]: add a --version flag to MSSQLConfigTool.exe

With the recent CVE, we upgraded our VBR Servers and had some old agents (ver 12.1) that broke because only N and N-1 agents are supported.

We're not particularly interested in managing the SQL Plugin via the VBR server, but we do need a way to audit where the plug is installed, what version it is and which VBR Server/Repository it's configured to hit. We need to do this via the CLI using powershell.

[Feature Request2] : make MSSQLConfigTool.exe's "--show-config" switch work with output redirection, as it's currently impossible to capture/redirect the output of this command.

We worked around both of these issues easily enough, but would prefer a documented/officially supported approach.

Code: Select all

    $results = @{}    

    cd  "C:\Program Files\Veeam\Plugins\Microsoft SQL\"
    
    [xml]$cfg = get-content veeam_config.xml 

    $results["VbrHostName"] = $cfg.config.VBRConnectionParams.VbrHostName
    $results["VbrPort"] = $cfg.config.VBRConnectionParams.VbrPort
    $results["VbrDomain"] = $cfg.config.VBRConnectionParams.VbrDomain
    $results["VbrUser"] = $cfg.config.VBRConnectionParams.VbrUser
    $results["RepositoryName"] = $cfg.config.RepositoryParams.Repository.RepositoryName

    $results["Version"] = (get-Item MSSQLRecoveryManager.exe).VersionInfo.ProductVersion

    return $results

[PetrM]

Hi Jesse,

Very clear and very valuable requests. I cannot comment now on timelines, but both requests have been noted.

Thanks!