Feature request to improve VBO Retention Policy

[m.novelli]

Hi guys, case # 07100963

The issue with this Customer is that the VBO Repository growth in about 3 - 4 years to 34 TB, and even lowering the retention it seems to never shrink

Thanks to opening a support ticket and after using VBO since 5 or more years with dozen of customers, I've just discovered that the retention policy doesn't work if overlap with the VBO backup job

So I suggest some improvements to VBO Product Team:

- change the default retention policy schedule from Midnight to Midday (or similar, not the night when the backup runs)
- clearly inform the sysadmin that is configuring VBO that if Backup Job overlap with retention policy job, the second one never run
- in the main VBO dashboard add a "running process" like in in Veeam Backup & Replication to check if the retention job is running or not: actually with this Customer the retention job is running since one week to purge more than 600 users and I don't have any way to understand if it's running or not, I have to look at some logs that are updated every two - three - four hours since the retention job is quite slow to process each user
- maybe make the retention job multiuser and improve the speed , it seems to me is single-user and super slow

Marco

[Polina]

Hi Marco,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention and for your suggestions. I don't recall any similar challenges so far, but it could be simply overlooked by other users. For the next versions, I already have some thoughts on how to make system tasks, such as retention runs, visible in the console; changing the defaults will require some more research (to look for timing best suitable for the majority of business cases and customers), but I'll definitely consider it.

[m.novelli]

Yeah, very strange to hit this issue with Repository Retention Policy after VBO being around since 2016

Marco

[m.novelli]

I would like to add a new feature request to this topic: the Retention Job should send a little report email with the usual [SUCCESS] [FAILED] header , common to many Veeam Backup tasks

I've started to think that many many many VBO customers never got Retention Job to run successfully and are unaware of that

Marco

[Polina]

Noted; good suggestion

[AlexL]

+1 from me

We also noticed this behaviour, we had large customers with thousands of users not being removed due to overlap with backup jobs and retention schedule.
We changed our retention schedules a few months back to 6 hours before the daily start of the jobs, that fixed it for us.

But a simple suggestion, just make the results of the retention tasks visible under History -> System, like in VBR where background maintenance tasks like rescans or inventory are visible under History.

The average sysadmin might now be completely unaware that this process is not running as it should and therefor might be paying more for (object) storage than they should.