After using agent-integration for some month (since update 3) I would like to make some suggestions for improvement:
If your agents use a veeam repository which isn't available during backup (e.g. when agent is out of office), job would fail. I would like to see a retry when repository comes online again.
restore points/retention: Why do agents count days with backup while B&R counts the actual restore points on disk ignoring how many restore points you have on the same day? You could quite easily get confused and honestly I don't care about days for me it's all about amount of restore points.
B&R Console: Inventory -> Physical & Cloud Infrastructure -> Offline: I think this list isn't really up to date. Everytime I'm checking it, I see orphaned entries. I think the list itself isn't refreshed that frequently but also the dnscache is sometimes wrong. When your clients use dynamic IP's via DHCP and if you haven't reserved all of them, clients could get other addresses and then dnscache would keep the old entries for some time. I would like to see the offline clients in real time, otherwise this feature doesn't make sense to me.
As always, please tell me your thoughts - I like know what others think about it.
mcz wrote:If your agents use a veeam repository which isn't available during backup (e.g. when agent is out of office), job would fail. I would like to see a retry when repository comes online again.
To clarify, what job type you are referring to?
mcz wrote: restore points/retention: Why do agents count days with backup while B&R counts the actual restore points on disk ignoring how many restore points you have on the same day? You could quite easily get confused and honestly I don't care about days for me it's all about amount of restore points.
Retention in 'days when computer was used' was implemented in free/workstation editions of Veeam Agent for Windows v1. Isn't it easier to explain to an end user that his laptop or desktop is going to be protected for 10 last workdays? From backup admin perspective you can schedule backup job to run daily and, in such case, you will have a single restore point per day.
mcz wrote:B&R Console: Inventory -> Physical & Cloud Infrastructure -> Offline: I think this list isn't really up to date. Everytime I'm checking it, I see orphaned entries.
Right click the Offline node and hit Rescan to update the list of offline computers and Veeam B&R will perform an instant check of every computer under the Offline node.
Dima P. wrote:Hello Michael, thanks for sharing your feedback!
To clarify, what job type you are referring to?
Sorry I've forgotten to mention that, we are using Workstation (policy).
Dima P. wrote:
Retention in 'days when computer was used' was implemented in free/workstation editions of Veeam Agent for Windows v1. Isn't it easier to explain to an end user that his laptop or desktop is going to be protected for 10 last workdays? From backup admin perspective you can schedule backup job to run daily and, in such case, you will have a single restore point per day.
Correct, if you are using daily backups it is easier to explain. But if not, it's quite confusing. Because what end users then understand is still "the last 10 days" but that would be then the same as restore points as long as user doesn't force backup manually multiple times on the same day. And that is still another important point: Finally you cannot control the amount of restore points and the needed amount of storage because when you set retention to say 10 days with weekly backup and users do manual backups say twice a day, wou would effectively have 20 restore points.
Dima P. wrote:
Right click the Offline node and hit Rescan to update the list of offline computers and Veeam B&R will perform an instant check of every computer under the Offline node.
Correct but in my case it took quite some time (more than 5 minutes). So it's not really on-demand and therefore I would like to see an automated update every x minutes.
Dmitry, could you please take a look at case # 02618822. Here we had the problem that veeam kept 6 restore points allthough retention was set to 5. The support engineer told me that veeam ignores increments during merge, which have been created on the same day. So you would always get retention + 1 restore points. Shouldn't that be changed?
And I have another question: When you use synthetic full, veeam would create it and start a new chain. The old chain stays untouched and won't get removed via retention. Is this a expected behaviour or a bug?
ok meanwhile I collected other ideas/missing features:
[*] when using policy mode, you cannot set a retry when the job fails. We are having some issues with network adapters and that causes the job to abort but it won't be restarted again.
[*] agent shows a warning when free disk space of repository is less than 10 % (I suppose) but this could still be a significant amount of space. I'd like to manage this warning by VEEAM ONE only so that the agents don't show those warnings.