How to get the space used by each VM from a Backup job

[liviu.tutuianu]

Dear all,

In our organization we have many VBRs with many backup and replication jobs. If for replication jobs is quite easy to see what is the space used by each replica, do you have any idea how can we see how much space is being used by each VM from our backup jobs? To be more precise, we have several backup jobs that contain multiple VMs inside and they are saved on some CIFS shares. We are able to see the total amount of space used by these jobs ... but do you know how can we see how much space is being used by each VM that is being backed-up?

I am asking this because we have a country where there are 2 companies that save their data on the same storage device. Now, the device is almost full and, before they will approve the extension of this storage, they need to know exactly how much space is being used by each company. FYI: we don't have Veeam One implemented. In the past, we had TSM as a backup solution for these 2 companies and there was really easy to generate this kind of reports.

If you need more information, do not hesitate to reply to this post.

Thanks in advance for your advice,
Liviu

[Vitaliy S.]

Liviu,

If you have VMs added to a single backup job, then these VMs will share some data in the backup file due to deduplication, so you cannot really tell how much data is consumed by each VM.

I would suggest to use per-VM backup file option in the Veeam B&R v9. In this case you will be able to get this kind of data via Veeam ONE predefined reports or manually for each client to justify the upgrade of the target storage.

Thanks!

[liviu.tutuianu]

Dear Vitaliy,

Thanks for your reply. You say that the only option would be to upgrade to v.9, after that to make a business case and ask for the approval of new hardware and new licenses for Veeam One, wait for the hardware to be delivered, install it, configure Veeam One and run some predefined reports? This looks "challenging" ( as we say in the corporations ).

Let's say that I can install and configure a Veeam One server... on a special hardware server... do you know if this report is included in the Veeam One Free Edition?:)

Thanks,
Liviu

[Vitaliy S.]

Veeam ONE free edition allows reporting on Cloud Connect infrastructure only, all backup related reports are available in the full version only. Anyway, my point was that if you have all VMs in a single file, reporting on used space by each VM is not possible due to shared blocks in the file (deduplication).

What I have suggested is to upgrade to v9 and switch to a new backup file configuration mode (per VM backup files). Yes, I agree, it may take some time to do that.

[odkaiser]

Hi

In our company we also would like to know this as part of Veaam B&R.

We need this report to show the TCO (Total cost of ownership) to the server owners and service owners.
Different servers host different services, and different services are owned by different teams.
Thus, if we can know how many backup size that every server has, we can know the backup cost from services.

In our previous backup solution, we were able to provide such information, and provide the monthly Cost Visibility report to server owners.

I know it is difficult as it is said above there is duplication involved. Is not possible to know how much information is taken for example form the CBT and keep a record of it?

Best regards
Daniel Kaiser

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Daniel,

If you would like to know the amount of changes (without compression) transferred to the backup repository, then you can achieve that with this report > VM Change Rate History

Thanks!

[bk@virtualtn.com]

Hello
I have backup file “XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.vbk” size 2.6 TB for 62 VMS
I need to know backup size for each VM on this job
Any solution for this ?

Thanks for your support
Regards

[foggy]

Bilel, please review considerations above.

[Vitaliy S.]

You can get this data after enabling per-VM backup chain option and using these reports > Backup Billing (v9 only) and Veeam Backup Files Growth (v9 only)

[SteelContainer]

Is there any way to get the per-VM backup storage usage from PowerShell or SQL in v10?

I see we can use the following to get the job storage size but we are aiming to push the per-VM backup storage usage into our asset database.

Code: Select all

Get-VBRBackup | Select @{N="Job Name";E={$_.Name}}, @{N="Size (GB)";E={[math]::Round
(($_.GetAllStorages().Stats.BackupSize | Measure-Object -Sum).Sum/1GB,1)}} | Format-Table -AutoSize

We use per-VM chains for all jobs. So I'm thinking if we can't do it from Veeam PowerShell we might need to just parse and sum the files on the actual backup storage.

Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Cullan,

Please take a look at this script example from Oleg, should help!

Thanks!

[SteelContainer]

Thanks Vitaly.

That wasn't quite what I was after but I think I have found what I need in the dbo.Backup.Model.Storages table in SQL.
I should be able to sum ‘backup_sizes’ for all of the columns with the same ‘backup_id’ and then match the ‘object_id’ to the ‘object_id’ from the ObjectsInJobs table to match it to a VM.

Cheers.

[DE&C]

I have a lot of customers (providers for internal or external customer) that need to provide a TCO billing. Therefore they need to know how much storage a VM, or Server/Desktop (Agent) is using. Not only per job, but also in total.

Users are requesting this since 2014 in this forum to have a total used storage overview per VM

[Vitaliy S.]

Users are requesting this since 2014 in this forum to have a total used storage overview per VM

Well, you can do that today, but only when per-VM chains are used. In case of multiple VMs sharing the same backup file, then it is not possible to give this data on the per-VM basis.