Have I missunderstood Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365?

[bhlgr015]

Ok so I have been using Veeam B&R for 10+ years and possibly naively assumed VB for M365 was similar, but it seems like its extremley limited (at least compared to our use case).

With B&R we backup each job to local storage (with job retention policies), secondary copy to Tape then backup copy to a repo at a remote site/DC. We are also going to add Veeam vault + Immutable repo for additional protection. All good no issues.

Now with M365 software we only have either local disk or object storage. We dont have any object storage so have a local disk based repo, thats fine so we now have 1 backup copy. But no secondary copy option, no copy job for additional repo's at external sites/dc. No option for veeam vault either???

Also no job retention policy or backup type (incremental/full etc..) and seems like its a simple retention policy based on the repo. So I need a repo for each job type if I wanted different rententions.

Have I missed something here or do I need to now backup M365 repo's with B&R? Just for clarity we are looking to only back OneDrive folders at this time as B&R does everything else (we are on prem for exchange, servers, etc..).

[Polina]

Hi Michael,

VB365 is indeed very different from VBR.
It supports backup copy functionality as well, but it works for object storage repositories only (see more here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo36 ... tml?ver=80).
Veeam vault is not supported.
The first backup is always full, all the subsequent are incrementals. Note that unlike VBR, VB365 does not maintain any backup chains and does not create any period or syntethic fulls.
Retention is specified on the repository, not on the job level.

Hope it helps.

[bhlgr015]

Thanks for the update, such a shame this is a seperate product and nowhere near as comprehensive as B&R. As a middleground... could B&R backup the local disk repository of M365? If so.. is this a similar repo to B&R with vbk vbr files etc..? or would it have to be the entire folder structure / db's?

And lastly I believe we can use veeam vault (in B&R) but its only for jobs via B&R / vbk, vbr files etc.. correct?

[bhlgr015]

So I've been doing a little more digging and found a post on this forum from 2018 talking about tape backups (suprised in the 7 years nothing has progressed in this area) and it is suggested that VBO is run on vm and backup that vm with VBR with application awareness then VBR see's VBO db etc.. and can then do restores. I pressume we dont need to migrate VBO to a vm and it can reside on the VBR host still and still backup this host (and repositories) and we will still get the same result?

Is this still the only method / recommended way to get VBO repo's to Tape, Veeam Vault etc.. ?

[Polina]

Hi Michael,

We do not recommend running the two products on the same host for performance reasons.
Note also, that niether it's recommended to use the same PGSQL instance for both solutions.
Sending backup of VB365 server/repositories to tape was tested with the community efforts, and I cannot guarantee that it works in all possible scenarios.
Protecting a VB365 Jet-based repository with VBR using app awareness is possible and there were a number of posts on this topic here on forums.

Thanks!

[bhlgr015]

Thanks @Polina, not too concerned with performance. Is there a serious issue with using the same PostgreSQL or again for performance reasons / future complications? I suppose we could spin up a new VM just for VBO but I'll just need to figure out where I want the data to sit as this could be a less than ideal usage of SAN storage over local disks on the VBR physical host (although saying that could I still use the VBR server as a repo for VBO?).

I'll see if I can find the posts that talk about tape backups, and any vault threads to see if I need to consider anything or can learn from others that are doing what I am proposing.

[Polina]

Michael,

Using a separate PGSQL will help to avoid future complications. We have already have several customer cases where the PGSQL shared between VB365 and VBR caused issues. Also, VB365 should have its own repositories, it's not compatible with VBR repos.
The following resources should be helpful for you to better plan your deployment:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo36 ... 365-server
https://bp.veeam.com/vb365/

Thanks!

[MVanek]

Hi Michael,
I have the same dissapointment about M365 backup options at this moment. I still hope there will be some improvment in the future.
Since I work for a lot of SMB customers, not everyone has Object Storage for saving backups or backup copies at all. Yes there are posibilites like MinIO, but it takes some time a care to make it working and not everyone wants it
Big challenge last few months Ive been having is that a lot of people want linux based appliance just like VBR V13. There are companies that does not want to run Windows servers for backups at all.
Anyway, you already mentioned - the way I go if its possible is install VBO365 as VM and then process is with VBR as regular image level backup with App Aware processing. Alternative way is to use VBR Agent for Windows and process VBO365 as well. With that types of backups you can work just like another VMs and servers at all. Copy jobs, tape jobs etc....
But in case if there is no VBR server at all, this options are obviously not available.
VBO365 as a standalone product is not full stack ready-to-go for me right now.

[janschulenburg]

You could have a look at Veeam Data Cloud, an online backup tool. Good performance, good exit strategy, enough functionality, fixed pricing per M365 license.

[bhlgr015]

I've had a quick look at the data cloud but doesnt seem to offer much more than M365 does apart from the storage location? We would still be lacking a tape copy of our data and secondary copies.

So yeah M365 still has a long way to go (or just ditch it altogether and build it into VBR imo)

So it seems like the current method for me (unless anyone else has a better suggestion) is, VBR and M365 as seperate hosts. VBR will backup M365 VM then I can do secondary copy jobs & backup to tape etc... This does result though in duplicate storage (1 copy on the M365 repo and 1 copy on the VBR repo). In order to avoid this I could just exclude the M365 repo drives (as I dont see a way to exclude files/folders from vm backups) Then do a files to tape backup from the M365 server to backup the repo but I dont know if this way results in the loss of the application aware restore or adds further complication?