From infrastructure function missing in new backup copy job

[xudaiqing]

When select objects in new backup copy job, from infrastructure function is currently missing, will it back in future versions?
I had backup copy job use from infrastructure (tags) to select objects.

[HannesK]

EDIT: post removed, because it made no sense anymore

[xudaiqing]

Hello,
yes, please see the answer above.

Best regards,
Hannes

I suppose you merged the thread and is replying to me.
I believe my problem is different from the problem in this thread. I am talking about select / include VMs in the backup copy job based on vm tags in vsphere, not copy from exist backup copy. I don't mind if a backup job need to be the source. Currently it can already exclude VMs based on tags, but i need to include VMs based on tags and exclude everything else, so vsphere admins can choose which vms to copy without touch the backup system.

[HannesK]

Hello xudaiqing,
yes, my reply was to you, but I missed the fact, that the merge created a "split" in the thread because of times of writing the different posts.

The "from infrastructure" option is not available in V12 GA. That affects the "backup copy job from backup copy job" and scenarios like yours.

Best regards,
Hannes

[HannesK]

Hello xudaiqing,
after some more discussions, I made your topic separate again. Sorry for the confusion

"From infrastructure" will not come back, because it makes no sense anymore with a generic backup copy job that can copy "everything". "From Infrastructure" also created a lot of negative feedback, when for example VCenter had issues and the BCJ failed because of that.

Best regards,
Hannes

[sebastian.mair]

hi, dummy question, after update to V12, is there no chance to use Backupcopy with the infrastructure objects to select? under objects=>add there is only from jobs, from repositories, no infrastructure? so now vmware tag based selection...

[Mildur]

Hi Sebastian

I moved your post to this topic.
Please see the previous answers.

Best,
Fabian

[Dynamic]

Hello xudaiqing,
after some more discussions, I made your topic separate again. Sorry for the confusion

"From infrastructure" will not come back, because it makes no sense anymore with a generic backup copy job that can copy "everything". "From Infrastructure" also created a lot of negative feedback, when for example VCenter had issues and the BCJ failed because of that.

Best regards,
Hannes

got your point... but @HannesK
what about: just select a short amount of "business-critical-systems" by a VMware Tag - and only VMs with such a Tag should be copied to another repository on a remote site, maybe with insufficient bandwith to copy all customer systems...? Let's say, our customer can't copy "everything" to that remote site.

[HannesK]

Hello,
doing tag-based backup copy jobs is limited to VMware and Hyper-V. One cannot do that with AWS / Azure/ Google VMs or databases. So the approach also does not really fit to a "one backup copy job to copy them all".

I ask myself, why the customers cannot do backup jobs for "business-critical-systems" and use these few jobs as source for a backup copy job.

Best regards,
Hannes

[xudaiqing]

Hello,
doing tag-based backup copy jobs is limited to VMware and Hyper-V. One cannot do that with AWS / Azure/ Google VMs or databases. So the approach also does not really fit to a "one backup copy job to copy them all".

I ask myself, why the customers cannot do backup jobs for "business-critical-systems" and use these few jobs as source for a backup copy job.

Best regards,
Hannes

But we already had tag based exclusions in V12, is tag based inclusion / selection really that problematic ?

[EvanWaite]

We drank the "Policy Driven" backup approach a number of years back (B&R v9.0) based on Luca's initial posts/blog/etc. This means we have tags based around a variety of tag categories

• Backup Job (Primary job, based on start time ex: 6pm, 9pm, 1am, 5am)
• Backup Authentication (flips the account for guest processing)
• Backup Options (turns off certain options, controls method of indexing, app aware, db log backup, etc)
• Backup Retention (which drives Backup copy jobs with certain retention)

So for any particular primary backup job, we might have VMs with multiple data retention requirements. Yes, we can create more backup jobs (and tie those to new copy jobs) but we lose the flexibility of just defining our retention with a tag and allowing the VM to be backed up at whatever time works best for that app/service. We have a number of jobs where that retention is mixed and would result is a large increase in the number of primary jobs to accommodate different start times with different retention.

Tags are automatically assigned by a daily script with some sane defaults if nobody sets a particular job/retention at creation. This approach works well for our ~1400 VMs we back up.

We'll need to do some rethink on how we do the backups going into v12 but I figured I'd mention our use case for tag based selection in Backup Copy jobs.

[pgilreath]

Hi all - After upgrading to V12, we are working through upgrading our jobs to the new per-VM metadata format. I have hit a bit of a snag with our job for cloud connect. We currently use vSphere tags to select which VMs the copy job moves backups for. To convert the copy job, I am following the directions from here: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

When I make a new periodic copy job, I do not have the 'from infrastructure' option on the Objects page of the wizard. The v12 documentation (https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120) does not list it either, the V11 docs do (https://helpcenter.veeam.com/archive/ba ... y_vms.html)

Was this feature removed? if so... does anyone have any advice on how to manage backups in this way? We like the simplicity of backup object selection being entirely controlled by vSphere tags.

thanks.

[Mildur]

Hi Paul

I moved your topic.
Please see the previous comments.
We have removed this feature.

As a workaround, you can create dedicated backup jobs with those tags. And then only copy those jobs.
The new backup format will allow you to move all VMs you want to copy to those backup jobs.

Best,
Fabian

[pgilreath]

Thanks Fabian. That is a massive disappointment. As Evan noted above, we too are doing policy driven backups, and the copy job is sourcing VMs from multiple backups. Having to create dedicated jobs just for the handful of VMs that we copy off to the cloud is a step backwards in terms of ease of management.

[JaySt]

is there a possibility to make veeam create a legacy copy job to still be able to select those infrastructure objects? registry value perhaps? or feature request for such ? legacy jobs run fine post upgrade, but not able to go ahead with tags concepts for new jobs is disruptive.
The argument Hannes made, makes sense imho, but could be implemented a bit more subtle with some more "phasing out..." strategy? i can't agree with the way this was done. i probably can agree on the "why" though.

[HannesK]

Hello,
unfortunately, there is no option like that.

We simplified the product and therefore, some features were removed. Agree, our communication on the backup copy job could have been better. I'm discussing with the team, whether such things could be added to the upgrade wizard in future.

best regards,
Hannes

[xudaiqing]

After some throught, can tag based exclusions exclude vms based on it don't had particular tags? It will cover most of the use cases without intruduce meaningful change to the current design.

[HannesK]

Hello,
one can exclude VMs from being copied that have a specific tag (e.g. "no-backupcopy"). That works if you click on exclusions and use the "show full hierarchy" checkbox and select the tag.

Best regards,
Hannes

[OTCN]

I am also disappointed to see tags have been removed from copy jobs. I just upgraded to v12 not knowing about this and tags were our criteria for what goes offsite and what does not. If I had seen it before I had upgraded all the other server components, I would have reverted back to v11 for now.

[JaySt]

Hello,
one can exclude VMs from being copied that have a specific tag (e.g. "no-backupcopy"). That works if you click on exclusions and use the "show full hierarchy" checkbox and select the tag.

Best regards,
Hannes

i don't understand this. Why would inclusion using infrastructure object be removed while excluding based on infrastructure items is still available?

[vta]

Hello,
I have the same problem, we are using rotaded drives (USB disks) to export VMs. In VMware I tagged the VMs, becaus I do not want that all VMs are exported to USB drives. Please add this feature to the product again.
Best regards
Volker

[JaySt]

Try excluding instead of including based on tags

[IQ-Solutions]

Hello,
I can only join. That was a key feature. You are welcome to add more features to the Copy Job, but not less. We are a hoster with X customers on our servers. Every customer receives a copy job from us configured for their VMs. With V12, our backup structure is in danger and we are considering going back to V11. We cannot work with "Exclusions". Too error-prone and if we forget to exclude a VM, the copy ends up with another customer. Then we have a data breach. Dangerous.
Best regards

[Steen]

I'm surprised this feature was removed and hasn't been brought back.
Unfortunately, I missed that this function was removed. If I had known, we wouldn't have updated to v12.
Now we have to find a solution other than v12 for a large part of our customers.

[HannesK]

Hello,
I understand that it is frustrating that functionality you are using was removed. Although the exclusions via "from infrastructure" work today, I would avoid them because they might also be removed in a future version. The copy job is built to copy backups. Having dependencies on the production management software (VCenter) is reducing stability and increasing complexity. That's why the "mirror mode" never had that dependency.

I agree, that our communication around this has room for improvement.

Best regards,
Hannes

[Seve CH]

Hi Hannes,

Evan Waite did a great job of explaining how we manage our infrastructure at the top of this thread. That was a big advantage of Veeam over other products for large deployments and that was a selection criteria for every company I worked for to choose Veeam. Veeam Essentials users may not need it, but once you scale, it's a must-have to optimize and organize rather than create up to a hundred backup jobs.

I think this one should have been well documented in the "what's new" and "things to consider before migrating to v.12" and for sure, in a deprecation roadmap. This is not a color change. This is functionality removal. May I suggest that you already announce that the "Exclusions based on Infrastructure" will be deprecated? I read the forum, but I'm pretty confident that most of your customers do not.

Best regards

[Spex]

We are also surprised and affected by the problem.

As already described by EvanWhite, we also use tags extensively to control backup time (backup job), retention (copy job), credentials (backup job) etc. (Unfortunately, the functionality has not been replicated for Agents by Veeam). We have 4 retention classes and about 10 backup jobs that use the time tags to select the VM which vm is to be backed up. The whole thing is handled by 4 copy jobs (one for each retention). Now I would have to define many new copy jobs to achieve the same thing. +1 for restoring functionality.

@ Hannes: I absolutly do not agree with this:
"From infrastructure" will not come back, because it makes no sense anymore with a generic backup copy job that can copy "everything". "From Infrastructure" also created a lot of negative feedback, when for example VCenter had issues and the BCJ failed because of that."

[Stupots]

I'm only just getting around to upgrading our "Legacy VMware Backup Copy" jobs to the new v12 type and I too have only just realised that "back from infrastructure" has gone. Surely stating "Having dependencies on the production management software (VCenter) is reducing stability" in relation to why this feature was removed isn't accurate as Veeam can't even do the original backup of a VMware VM without vCenter?

In our situation, we have multiple jobs with Linux VMs and multiple jobs with Windows VMs and we were using multiple copy jobs names "Tier 0 VMs" through to "Tier 4 VMs" to copy our most critical VMs from multiple backup jobs to immutable storage. At this time our immutable storage is not large enough to store all VMs, so a complete redo of all our jobs will be required to have normal backup jobs named something like "Tier 0 Linux" etc.

It's not the end of the world and maybe it's better practice in the long run, but it's extra work that I was not expecting.

Thanks, Stu.

[mschluchter]

This was really a bad decission from management to remove this feature... Out there is not the perfect world. We have to work with what we got, so this feature was really perfect for very long time copy jobs, for copies to special locations, ... If someone from management is reading here, pls bring back this feature!!!

[Gostev]

It was not a desired removal to start with but R&D just did not have enough time to port all existing functionality back to the newly designed universal Backup Copy engine in time for V12 release. Besides, backup copy engine changes made it really hard to support certain features of "legacy" (workload-specific) Backup Copy engine. Selection "from infrastructure" in particular requires a very major Dev and QA effort (lots of bugs and corner cases are expected). As mentioned, we saw this functionality creating heavy support load when it existed.