Dissapointed V5 Enterprise Manager still lacks keys fucntion

[ssmith@austar.com.au]

I have been using V4 for almost 6 months and despite all the benefits Veeam provides for our Virtual backup solution it lacks some key functions / features in its Enterprise Manager in relation to Job Management. I was expecting that V5 may bring these features however it hasn't (**Note I havent installed v5 as yet I am only going by the Doco's)

These Features / Functions are

1) Create a Job
2) Modify a Job
3) Disable / Enable Job

The above 3 features I would of thought are a must have.

Its very frustrating having to go to 2 different Locations to manage jobs

[Gostev]

Hello Shane, as I previously mentioned in the existing discussions on the similar topic, we do have this feature on the roadmap. We just go one step at a time! If we try to deliver all features at once, we will never release. Unfortunately, by the time this feature was first requested, v5 was already in feature lock state. Plus, it is massive feature in terms of web UI buiding effort, quite frankly - not something that can be easily "squeezed" into the release . But thank you for your feedback, and you can expect this feature sooner rather than later.

On the other hand, can you share your use case on why do you have to constantly create and update you jobs? Knowing this would help us design job management in Enteprise Manager UI. By the way, today most of our customers choose to create jobs using containers/folders, so that they never have to touch them again. Have you considered reducing the amount of required job editing this way until this feature is delivered?

Thanks!

[donikatz]

A couple common use cases of ours:

1) Cloned or recovered VMs. It's very common for us to clone VMs or restore VMs from a previous backup as a separate instance for our developers. One of the key reason we switched to Veeam couple of years ago was so that we DON'T have to use vCenter folders to manage our backups, since we use those for defining permissions (as designed by VMware) and grouping based on backup job doesn't jive well with that. So when we clone a VM or restore an instance, we often have to edit the backup job to account for the new VM.

2) Adjusting backup windows. It's very common for us to edit backup job scheduling for best performance, as VMs grow and job windows start to bump into each other. But even more common is to temporarily disable or reschedule a job during guest server maintenance.

Thanks

[Gostev]

So would it be fair to say that you mostly need web UI to only edit job content (VM to include/exclude), but not any other setting?

[tsightler]

I'm curious why Veeam is so reluctant to simply make the product 100% web based and do away with the Windows GUI altogether. It's really an unnecessary component that makes the product feel so "last decade". Almost none of our other "Enterprise" products have a non-web management interface anymore. At least the few that do have a local Windows client so you don't have to remote into the server to access the basic features like with Veeam.

[donikatz]

Yep, a Web UI is certainly fine (I agree with Tom's comments). Obviously we'd like fully-centralized job management, but yes, the most immediately useful for us would be: edit the jobs' included VMs, edit the schedule, and enable/disable. Thanks

[Gostev]

Tom, there are 3 reasons:
a) Lack of web UI developers, tons of people who can do Windows UI.
b) Little increase in value comparing to other features we have in mind.
c) Agree with you on Enterprise market, by SMB still prefers Windows UI for simplicity. However, since we want both SMB and Enterprise to be happy, enhancing web UI is one of our top priorities on the roadmap.

Doni, great - this is perfectly inline with our thinking too.

P.S. But before we stop investing into Windows UI, I just need to get VM processing order added there, otherwise some people on this forum will kill me over this soon I feel

[donikatz]

P.S. But before we stop investing into Windows UI, I just need to get VM processing order added there, otherwise some people on this forum will kill me over this soon I feel

Haha, definitely a more-important feature add.

[tsightler]

Tom, there are 3 reasons:
a) Lack of web UI developers, tons of people who can do Windows UI.
b) Little increase in value comparing to other features we have in mind.
c) Agree with you on Enterprise market, by SMB still prefers Windows UI for simplicity. However, since we want both SMB and Enterprise to be happy, enhancing web UI is one of our top priorities on the roadmap.

Perhaps you could consider at least providing a Windows "client only" GUI that could be installed on an admins local system. That would help some in our case and is pretty typical of Windows tools like Exchange, SQL, vCenter, etc.

[Gostev]

Yep, this is where we are heading to.