Retrieving SOBR / Object storage statistics w/o Veeam One

[n.kretschmar]

Hi all,

our company started to migrate all site backups, which mainly utilize for remote backup copies StoreOnce appliances in our regional data centers, up to AWS S3 object storage. The process per site is always a kind of unique depending on a couple of characteristics of each site:

• Connectivity

• Capacity of data to protect

• Capacity of the local storage (for the performance tier)

• Sizes of initial/full and incremental backup chains

• Time window to use for transfers

That leads to the ultimate need of an assessment before you change anything in Veeam B&R. So far so good. But...
Even if everything was planned carefully for the time of the assessment, things can change over the whole service time.

So I am looking for any way to retrieve statistics about the offload process, most beneficially in your PowerShell object model

• Synch status between performance and capacity tier

• Number and size of the queued but not offloaded items

• Number and size of objects stored, per repository and per workload if possible

• Estimated time to transfer based on historical information

I am sure, there are many more information in interests, and I may understand if you point me to Veeam One, but I believe, the software takes care of the process, so my expectation is the software itself provides the owner all existing information. (No judgement about Veeam One, it is a great software!)

Thanks and regards,

Nico

[oleg.feoktistov]

Hi Nico,

Couple of questions before I dive into powershell and .NET:

1. Do you mean the status of the last SOBR tiering session? That's the info we can provide.
2. What do you mean by queued but not offloaded items? Candidates for the next offload or the actual backups scheduled for offload when tiering session has started but the offload itself is not yet commenced? I'm asking because the actual estimate happens upon offload session start.
3. Number of storages (logical backup files) or blocks contained directly on capacity tier?
4. I'm not sure it would be very reliable. There are too many dynamic factors, which can change from one session to another (network bandwidth, task slots on repositories etc.).

Thanks,
Oleg

[n.kretschmar]

Hi Oleg,

thanks for your reply!

• Yes, simply a boolean result, if the SOBR is synchronized. I was already finding an approach in powershell-f26/demo-script-for-general- ... 73029.html the object to retrieve information. So maybe this is similar to your idea.

  Code: Select all

      #This type corresponds to SOBR Offload job
      $sobrOffload = [Veeam.Backup.Model.EDbJobType]::ArchiveBackup 
  
      # Get the last day's worth of jobs and IMPORTANTLY sort by time: Veeam's default list order may not be deterministic
      $jobs = [Veeam.Backup.Core.CBackupSession]::GetByTypeAndTimeInterval($sobrOffload,(Get-Date).adddays(-1), (Get-Date).adddays(1)) | Select-Object -Property JobName, Result, EndTime | Sort-Object -Property EndTime
  
      # Now loop through the ordered list and overwrite the value for each key (jobName) ending with the most recent for each
      foreach ($job in $jobs) {
          $jobRuns[$job.JobName] = $job.Result
      }

• Currently I set all SOBR to copy immediately, so I believe the result I am looking for is, to get a list of all data objects to offload in the next session, or being part of a current session, or being queued because the transfer was stopped for any reason.

• I can see the raw objects also from AWS S3. So it is more the information about of logical items.

• Got it. This more a nice-to-have.

Let me know, if there is something still unclear. Of course, I would like to contribute on the solution with my limited knowledge about the Veeam object model behind scene, so allow me to call this a joint venture effort.

Regards,

Nico

[oleg.feoktistov]

Hi Nico,

1. Yes, that's what I meant. Status of the last SOBR tiering session should be enough.
2. I'm afraid now that's not possible. Offload candidates are counted on a tiering session start, but as I checked this info is not exposed through powershell or .NET types. I noted it as an enhancement for future versions though.
3. This is possible to obtain only in case backups were moved with move policy and only with backup jobs:

Code: Select all

$backup = Get-VBRBackup -Name 'Backup Name'
$storages = $backup.GetAllStorages()
$storages | select PartialPath, ExternalContentMode

Here the storages with ExternalContentMode: External are the ones kept on capacity tier.
In case with backup copy jobs all storages have ExternalContentMode property set to Internal. And if they are moved with copy policy, they are simply absent in the output. We planned some enhancements for that matter in vNext, but cannot advise on any ETA.

Hope it helps,
Oleg

[n.kretschmar]

Hi Oleg,

1. Ok, got it. It will help at least to provide a general overview across all our site, which already switched over.
2. Thanks for that, I would appreciate this as a customer's feature request.
3. Thanks for that, I will try it out.

Thank you for your engagement in responding to my post here!

I hope, the Veeam product management sees and confirms the gap in managing SOBR and its offload process more transparently.

Regards,

Nico

[oleg.feoktistov]

Don't worry, product management sees everything here. Further on, it depends much on how demanded the feature is. Thanks!

[cmcdonald]

Hi, just adding a +1 to this. I also have been trying to do some reporting for a customer. Being able to get better visibility of data offloaded to capacity tier and also now archive tier would be very helpful.

Thanks,
Cameron

[Roland1985]

Hello, is there already a working and finished script for this? I'm looking for exactly the same how much GB was transferred.
I would be happy about your post.
yours Roland

[Andreas Neufert]

No, we don´t have this script as Veeam. But what I know is that various Dell EMC Partners (including the one above) offer this as service to their customers. So I would suggest to contact your DellEMC partner.

[n.kretschmar]

Just stumbled over my own post and some updates there.
It appears a bit poor when an information is available in the software, at least writing in log files, the already transferred data, and not written along the file information somewhere in the database. In this dynamic tiering setup with many dependencies, it should parseable by automation toolsets.

Btw, is there in Veeam One a report showing the current protection status, if we consider the capacity / archive tier being an important part of the a 3-2-1 rule?

Thanks

Nico