Full backup of a single VM, in a Veeam job

[ferrus]

A while ago, we needed to take a number of full backups, of some SQL VMs.
These VMs were part of parent Veeam backup jobs, with much larger SQL VMs.

What we required, was the ability to take a full backup of the individual VM, but leave the other VMs within the job.
After searching these forums, I found a number of posts which mentioned a powershell method.
There was a different GUI solution suggested, which I adapted for our environment.

I added Tags to the VMs in vSphere, which were to be excluded - then added that Tag to the Exclusion List in the job properties.
I ran an Active Full on the whole job - and the result was a full backup of just the VM we needed.

The ability to do this, doesn't appear to exist in the Veeam B&R console.
A couple of weeks later, I think I understand why.

The 30 Retention Points set in the parent backup job, has ballooned to 79 on the disk.
It seems the backup chain might be a little bit screwed, as going by the size of the backup jobs, the single VM we backed up - is using one VBK file, and the other VMs are using a much older one. VIB housekeeping doesn't appear to be working correctly as a result.

Thought I'd post this experience for other users, as there were a few threads asking for the same feature.
In theory - taking a single VM full backup within a job does work if required, but it comes at the expense of a fair amount of manual housekeeping later on.

Presumably the best way to re-align the retention points, is to take another Active Full backup?
Is there any way to do this with a one-off synthetic, to ease the load on the production SQL servers?

[Shestakov]

Hello ferrus,
Could you specify the backup method you used?

What we required, was the ability to take a full backup of the individual VM, but leave the other VMs within the job.

If you add new VMs to the existing job, it will make full for new VMs and increments for older VMs.
Thanks!

[ferrus]

Forever Incremental, 30 Retention Points on DAS.
No scheduled Fulls - we have a separate GFS backup copy to EMC DDs.

[Shestakov]

Have you tried to make an active full or change the retention to get rid of the older restore points?
I didn`t get your use case though, why you went for the workaround. Could you explain why adding new VMs to the existing job was not an option for you?
Thanks!

[ferrus]

Hi

I started the thread, more as information/warning for other users, to be honest. On this forum, and others - I found several people trying to do the same.

For the use case - all the servers were in a pre-existing job, with 30 days Tier 1 and 6 months Tier 2 backups.
Didn't want to disassociate the VM with that chain, and start again on a new job.
At the same time our DBA was demanding an immediate full backup, but didn't want all the other SQL servers in the job affected during production hours.

I'll do an active full, to bring everything on the same schedule - followed by a manual vbk/vib delete later on.
I was just wondering whether there was a way of forcing the active full to be synthetic?

[foggy]

As to your requirement to perform a standalone backup of a VM within existing backup job, then there're a couple of options that could be considered. Quick backup allows for an on-demand incremental backup of a specific VM and, if your DBA required exactly the full backup, you could use VeeamZIP to create an independent full for any single one or several VMs. Both do not require creating a new or editing the existing job.

I was just wondering whether there was a way of forcing the active full to be synthetic?

An on-demand synthetic full can be triggered with the help of PowerShell.

[WRS2200]

Thank you for the post. I had a similar issue, I was able to use VeeamZIP to create an independent full for a single VM, as described above.