VeeamBackup Office365 /Exceptions / Licensing

[tomas.olsen]

Hello, We are currently using VeeamBackup for Office365 to back up our entire organization in the cloud.
As of now, we have about 380 active users / employees within the company. We use Office365, OneDrive for Business, Sharepoint online and Teams.
I have always been told that Veeam licensing is based on "licensed users in office365". So backup of Sharepoint should not use extra licenses.
If I check "Backup the entire organization", I use about 600 Veeam licenses. We have paid for 500, so I am able to use 500 + 10% which is 550. So I am missing backup of about 50 objects/accounts.

We replicate AD to the cloud, so we have a lot of AD users replicated to the cloud.
I have created a Office365 group that I populate with a powershell script. A script that fetces unlicensed users and som other users from Office365, and ads them to the group for exclusions. The Office365_No_Backup group is added to the backup job as exclusion.

When I look at the groupmembers, I have both User, MailUser and UserMailbox objects registered. and the total number of members is about 1400. But now I see that I have less protected mailboxes then I should, only 44 protected and 789 unprotected when I run the report "Mailbox Protection".

I need a way to make sure I don't use an excessive amount of licenses when doing backup of office365. And I need a way to exclude certain objects.
Today, Running powershell to exclude my current objects against office365 takes hours.

I an curious how you guys mange your own backup of the cloud. When you have users with mailboxes, calendars for meetingrooms, Sharepoint, Lots of Teams in Teams, Onedrive for Business and so on. I find it difficult and at the moment I feel I need to license twice the numbers of users we have employed just to be able to backup our data. And I am afraid of the future when the numbers of Teams in microsoft Teams will increase.

[Polina]

Hi Tomas,

Two questions first to better understand the situation:
1) What VBO version are using?
2) Did you open a support call to troubleshoot this? (and if so, I'd be interested in its ID)

Thanks!

[tomas.olsen]

Hello Polina.
I am using Veeam Backup for Office 365 version 3.0.0.422.
And I have not opened a support ticket.
I had one a while ago. And I received a ps script that should be run once in a while to fetch all licensed users from O365, and then adding them to the backup job. But since we have a lot of salespersons in our organization, there are also a lot of turnover. I want to be able to backup the entire organization, with expections of some users. The script also tok a lot of time to complete since scripting towards the cloud for each users takes forever...

[Polina]

Hi Tomas,

I noticed that you've already reported on the same issue a while ago, but since your case ID has not been referenced I cannot follow up on the investigation. There were a few licensing fixes for version 3 and I suggest you contact support to apply the latest patch (please post the case ID in this thread).

Also, in the new version 4, there's something that you might be interested in - non-mail enabled security groups are now supported as a source for backup jobs.

Thanks!

[tomas.olsen]

So in a final desperate attempt, I upgraded to version4 and removed my o365 group of users not to backup from the exclusion list. So Now I should backup everything within O365.
Sadly I have only 91 licensed used, which is twice the amount as before I removed the exclusion group.
When I run the report for protected mailboxes, I still se about 250-300 users listed as unprotected. But in the backup consol I can not see that those users are having any issues. I do however see several users with warning saying the user does not have a valid O365 license, which is perfectly normal behaviour.
So now, even with no exceptions I am not able to backup all my users, only about 1/3 of them.

[tomas.olsen]

Just created ticket #03904247

[Polina]

Tomas,

Thank you for opening the case. I'll follow up on the investigation with the engineers.