Best way to protect Virtual Lab Appliances?

[BrianBuchanan]

I don't know if this is a feature request or what, but after we lost the volume on our dedicated SureBackup host that held our Virtual Labs we had quite a bit of work to rebuild it.

Ideally we would be able to right-click the lab and next our way through to have it automatically rebuild the missing appliances, but that doesn't work because it needs the appliance to open the properties.

The second option is to allow Veeam to backup the virtual appliances. Veeam currently refuses to back them up which is ironic.

Without backups of the virtual appliances our recovery was long, first we had to delete all the SureBackup jobs, then we had to delete all the labs. Only then could we start rebuilding the entire SureBackup environment, hoping along the way that we got it all back the same way. We couldn't even build new labs using the existing ones as references because again, it needs the appliance to be able to open the properties.

In case anyone is wondering how we lost the volume, back in the day a SureBackup of a Hyper-V VM (Instant Restore actually) necessitated the preallocation of the full disk space of the vms and the only way we could get enough space on this system was with a raid-0 of high capacity drives. Thankfully Veeam no longer does that but we didn't get to change before a drive i/o issue destroyed the raid. Ironic; "Veeam could back everything up, except itself."

Thanks for any ideas to back these up, or changing Veeam to allow them to be backed up, or work on the feature to allow the appliances to be easily recreated!