Design options

[johannesk]

I've been wandering about design options available with O365 backup module. Given the criteria that a company, single organization (not a service provider) needs to backup 20TB of O365 data and protect it with 321 rule, the most simple setup I can think of is:

VM with a large disk enough to download all the O365 data.
Have a single job (backup all mailboxes)
Backup the VM with Veeam VBR and copy it to a secondary repository in VBR.

However, now you have much more options with the 1.5 version. But I fail to see an inteligent way of utilizing it in a way so it would be better or more cost effective than the design I described above.

I'm sure there a lot's of customers out there setting this up these days. Has anyone thought of a more clever way to design the O365 backup infrastructure? I'd love to know how others are designing this.

[Mike Resseler]

Johannes,

My idea in this would be to use 1.5 and split it up into a few, smaller VM's (proxies). This will give you much more possibilities. You can still backup the different VMs into one single VBR job to achieve the 3-2-1 rule

[johannesk]

This would require more than one job per organization right?

One problem I see by having more than one backup job per organization, is:

How are you going to make sure all the mailboxes are backed up?

I'm not aware that I can get an alarm telling me that a mailbox is without backups. To me the only feasable option would be to let the job backup all mailboxes. Now the mailboxas are as vm's for VBR. Perhaps this is an idea for a future feature, to be able to create the backup jobs based on first letter in the name, and an alarm that sets off when a mailbox is without backup the last 24 hours.

[Mike Resseler]

Johannes,

That indeed requires more than one job. But it gives you advantages. You can create multiple repositories per proxy which means you can set different retention ranges and per proxy you can limit bandwidth.
finally, you can always create one specific backup job that contains all mailboxes (it will automatically exclude the ones that are in a different job).

For your future request, you can actually use PowerShell to figure out if there are mailboxes that are protected or not.

[johannesk]

I just noticed a nice feature that helps in the job creation.

If a mailbox is part of a backup job, you cant select it to be backed up by another job.

That really helps. Also, you can filter by e.g. 'Personal archive' and thus segment the jobs to different proxies/repositories.

If you can tell me what powershell command I can use to make a list of unprotected mailboxes, then I have a way to distribute the load to multiple proxies and make sure all mailboxes are protected.

What powershell command is that?

[Mike Resseler]

I believe it is Get-VBOOrganizationMailbox (can't check now, I am not in close range of my environment)

[johannesk]

Thanks Mike, this really helped alot.

Now I can see how it makes sense to create multiple backup jobs and make use of multiple repositories.

One thing that troubles me a bit, is that the list of mailboxes in the backup job, is static. But I think I can reconfigure the backup job to dynamically assign mailboxes to the backup job with a powershell script.

[Mike Resseler]

Yes, actually, my colleague has written a script as an example: http://blog.dewin.me/2017/09/adding-ado ... 5-via.html

And, if you select ALL MAILBOXES, then automatically new ones get in there also.