Large Backup Job Question

[artecu]

Hi.
I am currently rolling out Veeam Enterprise 6.1 to our fleet of approx 700 vms. We have a mix of Windows and Linux and as such I have based my backups on OS and environment (using vsphere folders) eg.
Production Windows, Production Linux, QA Windows, QA LInux, Developement Windows, Development Linux, plus a couple of others for Veeam infrastructure etc.
The idea was to group similar OS backups for better dedupe results and scheduling priorities between environments ie Prod jobs are run first, then QA etc.
I have a couple of questions:

1. With this strategy, is it possible to take a quick incremental backup of a production server without running the entire job or creating a seperate job for the one vm
2. If a backup job fails or takes too long on a particular vm (for whatever reason- snapshot issues, conflict etc), can it be restarted from the next one or configured to skip the dodgy vm and move on

Thanks for a great product guys and congrats on the award.

[foggy]

Hello, Andrew.

1. With this strategy, is it possible to take a quick incremental backup of a production server without running the entire job or creating a seperate job for the one vm

You cannot run the increment for the single VM in a job. All VMs in a job will be always processed.

2. If a backup job fails or takes too long on a particular vm (for whatever reason- snapshot issues, conflict etc), can it be restarted from the next one or configured to skip the dodgy vm and move on

The job will complete processing for all other VMs and then retry the failed VMs according to your retry settings (3 attempts by default). You cannot skip the VM being processed manually.

[averylarry]

You can change the order that the VMs attempt to backup, start the job, and then manually stop it after it finishes the VM you care about. Of course, it's a small window of time where you can get the job stopped before it takes a snapshot of the next VM available.

<<Insert all sorts of silly disclaimers here regarding the unsupported nature of this and the risk of corruption or whatever>>

[artecu]

Thanks Alexander and Ted. I suspected as much.
I will need to exclude the problem vm's Hard disk 2 (it was still backing up this 600Gb disk after 5:29:29 hours)and re-run tonight as I cant reorder the vms as Ted suggests due to the fact that I selected a folder rather than a list of vms. The idea behind the folder approach was to capture any new vms added to vsphere automatically and conserve space, I hope I am doing the right thing.

[foggy]

The idea behind the folder approach was to capture any new vms added to vsphere automatically and conserve space, I hope I am doing the right thing.

Yes, this is a common approach among our customers.

Btw, I've suddenly come across this PowerShell trick, seems to be doing right what you were talking about.

[artecu]

Thanks Alexander. I will give it a go.

[artecu]

Hi All.

Update. This worked well for jobs where I have specified the vms to be backed up but not in those jobs where a folder (containing folders of vms) is specified (all vms including the one specified are excluded so the backup has nothing to process). I am sure a small mod to this script would fix this but I am not familiar with Powershell yet. Thanks everyone for the assistance so far.

Andy

[foggy]

Andy, feel free to ask in our PowerShell subforum. I'm sure you may get help from other community members there.