Maintain control of your Microsoft 365 data
Post Reply
dustinn3
Influencer
Posts: 22
Liked: 6 times
Joined: Oct 14, 2013 1:53 pm
Full Name: Dustin Newby
Contact:

Feature Request: Unlicensed Mailboxes

Post by dustinn3 »

Per Update 1 Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is now generating warnings for mailboxes without valid licenses.

Unfortunately even though we are getting a warning at the start of the job it still tries to back it up creating a failure. Then the backup job retries the job multiple times creating 3 more failed jobs.
1. If it knows it can't backup the mailbox at the start of the job why does it still try?
2. If it knows it's a license failure why does it retry the job multiple times which moves from a warning to a failure?
3. Can we reclassify the warning not to cause a failure or have a setting to skip mailboxes without a valid license?

Thanks,
Mike Resseler
Product Manager
Posts: 8044
Liked: 1263 times
Joined: Feb 08, 2013 3:08 pm
Full Name: Mike Resseler
Location: Belgium
Contact:

Re: Feature Request: Unlicensed Mailboxes

Post by Mike Resseler »

Hi Dustin,

We indeed changed the logic to make it a warning instead of an error when there are unlicensed mailboxes. However, I don't believe that it is intended behavior that it retries after that. Could you please log a support call for this? Post the support case ID here for reference and later the outcome also.

Many thanks
Mike
Kostya
Veeam Software
Posts: 104
Liked: 28 times
Joined: Jun 18, 2012 9:38 am
Full Name: Kostya Yasyuk
Contact:

Re: Feature Request: Unlicensed Mailboxes

Post by Kostya » 2 people like this post

Hi Dustin,

Some details on how it works. There is a sort of a bug on MS side: when Veeam Backup for Office 365 requests a list of all organization mailboxes (in case 'All Mailboxes' is selected in a job), sometimes mailboxes that do not have Exchange Online license assigned in Office 365 are returned (those with the ‘SKUAssigned’ attribute set to ‘False’ or empty). That account is showed in Exchange admin center as a regular licensed account with a mailbox. However, in the main console (https://portal.office.com/adminportal/home#/users) this user is shown as not licensed ('No product license have been assigned' is displayed in 'Product license') or doesn't have Exchange Online license (Exchange Online plan: Off). Access to such mailbox is not allowed (including admin access using impersonation). On attempt to access it, user will get an error saying: 'Error occurred. Mailbox is unavailable. Probably license is expired for this mailbox'. So there is no way to backup such mailboxes.

The easiest workaround is to assign Exchange Online license for that mailbox, click 'Save', and then revoke the license switching it back to 'Off'. In this case, account will become Unlicensed and will not be returned in our request for organization mailboxes, resulting in successful backup job.

How the product handles these mailboxes: in GA we silently skipped them, but we had several requests to change this behavior, since we're literally hiding a problem from an admin. So in Update 1 the job will finish with a warning giving admin a chance to react. This doesn’t affect other mailboxes that will be successfully backed up and restore point for them will be successfully created. Admin will get an email notification that some mailboxes he/she intended to backup were not processed because of a licensing issue and can decide whether he/she wants to backup them during a retry (so he needs to provide a valid license for them) or not (in this case he needs to assign and revoke license as described above).
Post Reply

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: Bing [Bot] and 13 guests