Feature suggestion for deleted VMs

[mamosorre84]

Hello everyone,

in the community we were talking about how to archive vms deleted from the hypervisor.

https://community.veeam.com/discussion- ... -vm-s-4000

What everyone agrees on is that the best is to move them to lower-cost storage than the primary backup storage.

My idea is that you could add a feature, perhaps an optional checkbox on the storage-advanced tab or on the SOBR settings, where you let the user have the option to automatically offload to a capacity/archive tier the deleted VMs and keep them until the "remove deleted data after" setting expires.

What do you think?

[HannesK]

Hello,
instead of adding checkboxes and increasing complexity... what's wrong with the suggestions made in the community plus "exporting that backup to a cheaper repository" (new functionality in V12)?

Best regards,
Hannes

[mamosorre84]

Hi Hannes,

it is good to hear this news!

Is this an automatic functionality?

[HannesK]

Hello,
if you automate "export" with PowerShell, then yes.

offload to a capacity/archive tier the deleted VMs and keep them until the "remove deleted data after" setting expires

how many days do you have for that "remove deleted data after" setting usually?

and just curious... how much costs do you believe that would really save? I mean, a customer would need to copy data to a different repository, which is also not "for free" from a bandwidth / storage perspective. Also the difference between on-prem storage and cloud storage for some weeks should be relatively small if the customer is using recommended storage options (dumb block storage on REFS / XFS).

Archive tier has long "minimum retention", so I doubt, that there is really a measurable cost saving for most customers.

Best regards,
Hannes

[mamosorre84]

Personally, we set 90 days, but it also depends on each case/client, sometimes it can be up to a year.

The space saved depends, it can be small VMs but it can also be TB servers.

My opinion is that depending on each case there can be a huge savings, and if it can be automated in the settings of a job, for users it is just a benefit..the complexity maybe is for you in programming it!

[vmtech123]

I have requested similar things before but would love more archive abilities with Veeam.

Also file archive. I want to delete files off the production SAN but keep them for historical reference. We have insane retention policies and don't need it on the file share.

If I could archive to Tape and Wasabi and have a file tree in another menu for restores that would solve SO many issues we have.

[vmtech123]

I'll add, some of these shares that I want to archive are not accessed frequently at all. and restores or very infrequent.

If I could send to 2 tape libraries, or a tape lib and Wasabi, the cost savings would be large. We retain data for 60-100 years in many areas. Lots of video files too.

Our production SANs are expensive.

Having this data on tape in 2 spots is good enough for us as well (3 is better if we can add Wasabi)

[HannesK]

"backup" and "archive" are two very different use-cases. For foreseeable future, we will do backup (even if you can store backups for long, it's not an archive).

looks like an "export to tape" could be useful. That's different from the original request. Having a VM backup on tape, that is 60 years old sounds useless to me, and that's where archiving would be the way to go. I mean, who would be able to restore VMware in 60 years, if they might not even exist anymore. Who knows what happens in 60 years

[vmtech123]

To be fair I won't be working in 60 years, but I do like to do my best for the people who will take over.

I am aware a backup 60 years down the road is NEAR useless, but we technically still have the data.

Something like file to tape would be amazing Similar to what we do with TSM. The only thing is the VUL license on file to tape makes it impossible for us.

I have mentioned before we have 30-50TB file servers so when you have 15 of those, I'd rather pay 15 VUL than 80 - 100+ VUL and 8x our cost.

And I only need to archive VM's for a year or 2. the file shares / files I need to keep though.

TSM's archive ability and replication between tape lib's will be here to stay I guess.