NEW FEATURE REQUEST: in a backup job a new option to process VMs sequentially instead of in parallel

[ditedisi]

We know this is a long-standing problem affecting thousands of users, but I hope you've found a permanent solution.

We have a daily backup job that contains all the Exchange infrastructure VMs. They are all Microsoft Windows Server 2025-based VMs.
One of these VMs is the Exchange Administration Console server.
The other two are the only members of the only infrastructure DAG,
The infrastructure has four mailbox databases, divided equally between the two mailbox servers. SERVER-1 has DB-1 and DB-2 as active databases, and DB-3 and DB-4 as passive databases. Obviously, the other server has the reverse.
Every DBs is in a different HD.

Not always, but almost every day, the job terminates with a WARNING: "VSS: Backup job failed. Cannot notify writers about the 'BACKUP FINISH' event. A VSS critical writer has failed. Writer name: [Microsoft Exchange Writer]. Class ID: [{XXXXXXXXX}]. Instance ID: [{XXXXXXXXX}]. Writer's state: [VSS_WS_FAILED_AT_BACKUP_COMPLETE]. Error code: [0x800423f3]."

This occurs because the job processes all disks on all servers in parallel. Therefore, it processes the active and passive databases simultaneously.

Veeam's solutions for this long-standing problem are:
1) Split DAG VMs into different jobs
2) Create a proxy server to be used only for this job, with the task count set to 1
3) Use "copy only" on one of the two DAG members

These aren't solutions for us, but rather workarounds that we don't accept for various reasons.

All it would take is a flag in the job settings that says "Backup JOB VMs sequentially instead of parallel!" Something so that only when it've finished processing the first VM can it start processing the next one!

Why has this solution never been considered? It would solve all the problems!

Thank you so much


I hope you have a solution.