Feature Request for Guest Processing

[dinger76]

I've been working on a project recently utilising Riverbed Steelfusion and making sure that backups are performed correctly for virtual machines on that environment.
For those who do not already know, Steelfusion projects storage from a data centre to a remote office, which then appears as iSCSI storage to a virtual environment which is hosted on the device at the remote office. Any changes to the virtual machines on that projected storage are replicated back to the data centre storage.
To perform a backup of the virtual machines, there is an inbuilt method within the Steelfusion design that takes a storage snapshot (from the data centre), presents that snapshot to a Backup/DR environment and registers the virtual machines to the same Backup/DR environment in the data centre - in a powered off state.
This then allows us to perform backups utilising Veeam on the virtual machines in the Backup/DR environment without affecting the production servers located at the remote office. This means that backups are fast and are already offsite from the remote office.

This method works really well but we believe that there is a way to enhance it further by allowing self-service restore of files from these backups. As you know, to perform a self-service restore of files through the Enterprise Manager portal, you need to have performed a backup of the virtual machines with the 'Enable guest file system indexing' enabled, but this function also requires that the virtual machines are powered on to index them.

As a feature request, I think that it would be a useful option to offer the capability for a virtual machine to be powered up just for the indexing to take place if the virtual machine is powered off (obviously without network connected). The way that I would see it happening is that the virtual machine is powered up during the initial backup processing. As the indexing process is performed at the beginning of the backup process, this can continue and then the virtual machine is powered down again before performing the main part of the backup process.

This feature would be useful for our environment (and for anyone else utilising Steelfusion) but also there may be other situations where this would be useful.

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi Chris, thanks for sharing this.

I understand the problem and the situation. As you have already found out for Self Service restore, we need a running operating system for Guest processing and Indexing.
Overall this situation is a rare corner case and we will come potentially never to the point to have a solution for this. Maybe we will change our File Restore processing over time and as a side effect it would work there as well.

As a tip, maybe you can work on a Veeam pre Job script that prepare the VM for this processing.
The Pre Job Script need to do the following:
- VM configuration. Disable all Network connetion including "connect at boot".
- Boot the VM
Let Veeam job process the VM with networkless VIX based Guest processing through VMware Tools VIX channel.

Of cause you need to prepare the VM for this and likely you have to use the "Administrator" account if Windows UAC is enabled.