Feature Request - Maintenance Window

[Skyview]

Submitting a feature request - Maintenance Window

So many times as a service provider/backup manager for many many environments I get emails like:
"Can you disable the backups for this weekend while we _______"

Which entails me:
-Logging into local veeam environment, usually on a friday night just like tonight, waiting until the backup has finished and then disabling. Either that or logging in in the morning and changing the whole scheduling routine to run once at xxxx
-Setting a reminder in outlook for monday morning
-Logging in Monday morning and re-enabling the backup(s) and/or redoing the schedules.

It would be great if I could set Maintenance windows on individual backups- or even entire Vcenter environments, where the backups would just not run during those maintenance windows. And you could even extend that to individual repositories and all effected backup jobs pointed to those repositories. Or extrapolate that out to any backup infrastructure element, even tape units!

Thanks!

[Shestakov]

Hello,
We are working on some related Veeam ONE feature and I would like to clarify the request.
Am I correct saying that main reason to disable backups is some works on the environment and additional load backup processes cause is not desired? Then you are asked not to load some repository/proxy/host etc. and you want to disable backup jobs which use particular object for a predefined period of time?
Thanks for the feedback!

[Seve CH]

Hello,

In my case, it will be interesting to be able to schedule periodic or "one shot" maintenance windows per VM:

Periodic DB reorganization/reindexing. Some applications reindex all DBs once a week/month. That's a lot of I/O and data modified = huge snapshots. It is not a good idea to create or remove a snapshot while reindexing 100GB tables.

Periodic data export/import jobs. For instance, export production DB to a folder, import in test. Again, sometimes it is 800GB or more.

And also, punctual maintenance. Sometimes it is needed to fix DBs, migrate data, update applications, etc. which may involve a lot of modified blocks and/or IO. The SAP team might work during the night, but I prefer to go sleep and not to care about enabling/disabling backups by hand

And there is also vmware infrastructure maintenance/patching which might require to disable all activities in a specific vCenter/host server.

Regards.

[Shestakov]

Thanks for the great reply, Steve!

[glamic26]

From our experience, a team will have some upgrade or maintenance work scheduled for out of hours on an application set. They will, therefore, request that the backup for those application servers (which are normally backed up at let's say 10pm) are backed up before the work starts at 7pm instead of the usual backup time. To do this, as Skyview has said, means changing the schedule for the whole job, waiting for it to finish, disable the job and then set the schedule back to the normal 10pm time. Then the next day un-disable the job so that it runs at 10pm that evening as per usual.

Setting a one-off override for this would be useful so that on a scheduled day (or days) the main job schedule is overridden by a temporary schedule. In the example above it would be to change the backup time from 10pm to 7pm for one day only. If we were able to do this it can be set up during working hours and nobody would need to log in outside normal working hours to then make further changes to the schedule and job, and nobody would need to remember to un-disable the job the next day. There would also be a use case for an override to simply run no backup for the set override schedule (for example maybe the application team is running performance testing and don't want backups to affect the figures).

[Skyview]

It's not so much the additional processing load myself and my customers are looking to avoid. It's more about preserving integrity of the backups. Maintenance can mean that in the middle of a backup anything can suddenly go offline- network,storage, vm proxies, vm hosts.

Also keep in mind application-aware processing can meddle with the environment while you're doing some major and delicate modifications. Definitely unwanted.

Add to that the possibility of people having some heavy-duty pre and post processing scripts that could really make things go south if they ran during maintenance.

[kkuszek]

I think I actually submitted a similar feature request not that long ago.
This could actually be achieved by configuring jobs to have a start date. This way you edit a job before the window to say "start Feb 4th" and it gets passed over until that condition is met.

[andyg]

+1 good idea

[andyg]

In our case, it would be nice to set a maintenance window on Veeam for when we do work on vSphere or VMware.

So Veeam backups won't run while we are upgrading vSphere or VMware.

[Shestakov]

Got it, Andy!
Thanks for the feedback!

[kkuszek]

You could probably also configure this (if you go the maintenance window method) to set in the infrastructure host/vcenter/datastore/etc. resource as "maintenance mode" with an option to set a start/finish date if wanted.
You would need a console screen warning thought to prevent people from enabling it and forgetting. Maybe a bright red ribbon button that appears? or a title bar color change?

[pdrangeid]

I've written a pair of powershell scripts in an attempt to address this issue. I have the same issue, and multiple Veeam Servers to manage for our customers.

This is a first draft (and not terribly sophisticated), so I'd like to hear feedback.

here's the download link: https://github.com/pdrangeid/veeam-maint:
Check the readme for more details.

The 'disable' script only disables the SCHEDULE, and allows jobs to continue running. So run this script plenty early BEFORE your maintenance, with enough time to allow your running jobs to gracefully complete and close. (maybe in a future version I could add a -stopjobs @time )

This will record the job name(s) of the "disabled" schedules in the registry. The 'enable' script can be run at any time, and will read the registry keys, and 're-enable' those jobs. To address the discussed issue of 'forgetting' you put your system in maintenance mode, you could use Windows task scheduler to run a job every Monday morning at 4am to run the 'enable script' just-in-case'