Feature Change Request

[scarlson]

I like having the lighter Veeam Agent for individual server clients, but some clients have policies and DR plans that require or would be heavily aided by some slightly more advanced features. The features and reasoning will be each below.

Job Queueing/Scheduling:
The ability to schedule job B to kick off after job A rather than a dedicated time would greatly aid slow backup jobs such as cloud uploads with slow internet speeds or servers with older and slower large capacity drives. We have a cloud backup that is trying to upload a roughly 1TB backup over a 50Mb connection. I understand that this will take over 40 hours assuming we maintain capped speeds, but this would be an ideal job for a weekend for the client, and then have the standard local backup queued to run again after this job completes. The way it runs now, the job interrupts itself and it cannot complete.

Backup Copy:
Along a similar vein, the inability to copy a pre-existing backup file from primary job using a secondary could drastically cut down the time it takes to process a larger backup file. As it stands, each job runs a full backup on its own, and you can't reference any other job for any reason. Since in essence copying a backup job using another is primarily copy>paste with (to my understanding) minor metadata changes, is there a reason this can't happen?

Speed Throttling:
Performing cloud backups over a slower connection can very easily turn into a very long and drawn out process. Would it be possible to implement a setting tied to the backup window setting where you can put a cap on but permit internet transfer speeds during the blackout window? This would allow weekly uploads of a job (the aforementioned copy) to persist throughout the week. Since it could utilize a copy of an already existing file there would be minimal processing overhead, and the job could potentially run parallel to a standard backup. This would be a good feature to include in all versions of Veeam that can integrate with cloud repositories.

[Mildur]

Hi Sam

Thank you for your requests.
May I ask what you mean with "cloud"? Object Storage or Veeam Cloud Connect?

but this would be an ideal job for a weekend for the client, and then have the standard local backup queued to run again after this job completes. The way it runs now, the job interrupts itself and it cannot complete.

The job should not interrupt itself. If I remember correctly, you can schedule two agent jobs at the same time. One job will wait until the other job has finished. After the first job has finished, the second job will start processing. It's like queuing jobs.

Backup Copy:
Along a similar vein, the inability to copy a pre-existing backup file from primary job using a secondary could drastically cut down the time it takes to process a larger backup file. As it stands, each job runs a full backup on its own, and you can't reference any other job for any reason. Since in essence copying a backup job using another is primarily copy>paste with (to my understanding) minor metadata changes, is there a reason this can't happen?

Backup Copy is a feature from Veeam Backup & Replication. We currently don't have plans to make it available for standalone agents. Backup Copy is much more than just copying the same backup file to a secondary location. We will create a new backup chain for the copy jobs. New backup files, new Metadata.

Speed Throttling:
Performing cloud backups over a slower connection can very easily turn into a very long and drawn out process. Would it be possible to implement a setting tied to the backup window setting where you can put a cap on but permit internet transfer speeds during the blackout window? This would be a good feature to include in all versions of Veeam that can integrate with cloud repositories.

Such feature is available in Veeam Backup & Replication. V12 and later allows you to specify different throttling values through the day. Veeam Agent allows only one throttling value through the entire day.

Best,
Fabian

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[scarlson]

May I ask what you mean with "cloud"? Object Storage or Veeam Cloud Connect?

We have clients that pay for offsite/cloud backups. Our service provider of choice is iLand from 11:11 Ststems.

"The job should not interrupt itself. If I remember correctly, you can schedule two agent jobs at the same time. One job will wait until the other job has finished. After the first job has finished, the second job will start processing. It's like queuing jobs."

Currently, the large cloud upload job we have stops itself when the next job is scheduled to run. The jobs are scheduled at 6 and 8 PM respectively. Job A takes about 90 minutes, so I gave it a 2 hour window to allow for some wiggle room. Job B will run for 23 hours but will stop as soon as the next instance of Job A is scheduled to run. I main time this is noticeable is over the weekend as the backup window is set to be wide open from 6PM on Friday until 8AM on Monday, so there's nothing but other scheduled jobs to interrupt the currently running job. So I do notice that Job A finishes over the weekend, but Job B never finishes uploading and the runtime never exceeds 23.5 hours. This does hint that multiple jobs can run at the same time, but I believe a proper job queue would aid in the success rate of this.

"Backup Copy is a feature from Veeam Backup & Replication. We currently don't have plans to make it available for standalone agents. Backup Copy is much more than just copying the same backup file to a secondary location. We will create a new backup chain for the copy jobs. New backup files, new Metadata."

Right, I get this. And from my experience with Veeam Backup and Replication the copy processes a decent bit faster than a standard full backup job. We have a client that utilizes a backup to a bare metal server, and a copy job to an on prem ioSafe. The same processing speeds and expectations can't be directly translated to a cloud backup job for obvious reasons, but as the primary backup file is already taken it stands to reason that it would be a fairly simple job to implement. That being said, as nice a feature as it would be, it also would start blurring the lines between the two agents quite a bit so I could also understand the desire to keep them segregated.

"Such feature is available in Veeam Backup & Replication. V12 and later allows you to specify different throttling values through the day. Veeam Agent allows only one throttling value through the entire day."

I haven't seen this in any version of Veeam, but if it's only since V12 then that would explain it. Currently iLand doesn't support integration with V12 and only supports V11 for now. Once I'm able to update the product then this could be resolved. That doesn't nullify that it's a fairly basic and very useful feature that could prove invaluable. Due to the high chance that any environment that would see a major benefit from this feature would be at the very least a standalone server with a large storage pool, it wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to introduce the feature and keep it locked behind a licensing wall.

[Mildur]

Hi Sam

Your requests are noted.

Currently iLand doesn't support integration with V12 and only supports V11 for now.

I suggest to reach out to iLand/11:11. You should be good to update to V12 as well. There homepage mentions that v12 is supported for all regions.
https://1111systems.com/services/cloud- ... for-veeam/

Best,
Fabian

[scarlson]

@Mildur I was just informed of this today by iLand. It looks like their upgrade took place while I was out of the office on medical leave so I missed the notification. I'm planning on installing an upgraded version in a test environment and playing around with the cloud backup.