Forcing active full for selected VMs only?

[Moebius]

After upgrading to VBR v6.1, my SureBackup jobs are finally working. I had never been able to run a single SB job previously: after processing two or three VMs of the linked job the disk read latency of the processed VMs went to end-of-scale and the whole lab froze. This has gone on for a long time but version 6.1 finally fixed it --- hooray!

On the first successful SB run, it appeared that one VM of the job would not start, due to a "ntoskrnl.exe missing or corrupt" error. An Instant Recovery of this VM confirmed that its backup was corrupt. The backup job is configured as reverse incremental with no active fulls (incremental forever), so the buggy blocks in the backup file would never be refreshed. I see that without a SureBackup run this would have gone unnoticed, as the daily jobs go just fine. As for the cause of the corruption, this might very well be caused by some storage issue, as no problem was logged at backup time by VBR. So it is very clear now that checking every backup with SB is at least as vital as it was the "verify backup" option in the old-style backup applications.

To correct the corrupt VM image an active full is in order. An active full for the whole job takes too long and exceeds the standard backup window. My question is, is it possible to force an active full for just one VM or selected VMs of the job? Would this be a desirable feature for a future release?
If I delete the faulty VM from the backup file (not from the backup job) using the "remove from disk" option from the Backups->Disk pane, would this force an active full for that VM only on the next job run?

[Vitaliy S.]

If I delete the faulty VM from the backup file (not from the backup job) using the "remove from disk" option from the Backups->Disk pane, would this force an active full for that VM only on the next job run?

Yes, that should force our job to create a new full backup of this VM.

[Helqasem]

As an alternative to removing the VM from disk.. which would also remove all historical restore points..

You could try this handy powershell script:
http://vpowercli.wordpress.com/2012/01/ ... -in-a-job/

On line 18 add the switch -FullBackup to the Start-VBRjob cmdlet. That should force a full instead of incremental.

[Moebius]

The powershell script looks great, I'll give it a try. Thank you!