Select VM backup order

[m.novelli]

Hi, I'm new here but I'm using Veeam since one year

One question: how do I choose a VM order during Veeam Backup? It seems to me that the order is a little bit random

I'm running Veeam 4.1

Thanks,

Marco

[Gostev]

Marco, there is no option to choose the VM order. Why does it matter for you, as long as you can fit in your backup window?

[m.novelli]

Well, I don't want overlap Veeam Backup with daily Symantec Backup with local System State backups with...

I would like to run first Exchange and SQL Server VM Veeam Backups so I'm sure they don't overlap with nightly Exchange and SQL Maintenance

Marco

[Gostev]

This will not be reliable way to ensure this. If Exchange backups works longer than expected, the SQL VM backup would start much later than you expect, and still overlap. I would recommend to setup separate jobs for Exchange and SQL, and start these jobs at designated times - this would be a better way to achieve this.

I agree VM ordering may be useful feature for some scenarios if you have a few VMs, but with hundreds or thousands of VMs it is hardly possible to micro-manage VM ordering, this is why this feature has not been priority for us.

On a side note, I am interested as to why do you backup the system state with Symantec, in addition to having Veeam doing full backup images (which already contain everything)?

[m.novelli]

Well, my typical customers has two Vmware host: one for production VM and one for replicas, both with local storage, plus an third Server with local DAT for data backups
Generally I have 5 up to 10 VM on the production host, not more

I have only a few customers with SAN

So it would be very helpfull to me to be able to choose the VM backup order in Veeam options for those little customers and put all VM in a single "big" job that backup them sequentially.

On the side note, I'm 10 yeas old sysadmin and I've learned to not rely on a sigle backup solution, so I prefer to mix full VM Veeam Backups with Symantec Backup (data only) with Windows System State backups.
Even more is better to restore some critical Windows components (Active Directory and Exchange, for instance) with backup-aware applications, and not just restore the full VM

Ciao,

Marco

[arthurp]

Hi, we are evaluating VEEAM v4.1 and my question goes to the concept of using multiple backup solutions (regardless of rationale behind it). Currently we use Symantec Backup Exec with LTO3 in a very traditional way (system state, file backup, SQL and Exchange backup). As we are testing VEEAM, I'm looking for possible interdependency issues, if jobs from Symantec and VEEAM are overlapping on the same object. While this is mostly important for transition period, I would expect that some Symantec jobs will be retained to provide additional level of protection, see post above from Marco.

Thank you

Arthur

[Gostev]

Arthur, thanks for following up.

So if I try to sum up or paraphraze your statement to get to the bottom of things, you are planning on retaining Symantec to have that additional level on protection simply because you don't 100% trust backups produced by Veeam. Yes, or No? I purposely took it down to very direct and "harsh" (against Veeam) statement just to help me understand the real reasons better.

Or in other words, because you probably have much experience with backups, you have already learnt to not trust any backup solution out there. You probably had situations before with corrupted backup issues when corruption was only found at the restore time, so by having 2 systems you are hoping that this would reduce the likelyhood of you being unable to restore some VMs quite significantly. Am I right? Or not?

I am actually thinking about something else, but connected to this - which is why I am asking all this.

[arthurp]

No problem with VEEAM - in fact I like the product. The issue is rather that we've been using Backup Exec for quite some time and it worked for us. Now, moving to the virtual environment, we want to take advantage of new DR/BC solutions. However, as you can understand, "trust" is not built overnight. Being a small company, we don't have a dedicated testing environment where we can fully test all features of new products. Our VEEAM implementation will likely be phased in on live environment. Also, VEEAM doesn't answer (correct me if I'm wrong) the need for long term archive storage that is usually implemented with tape rotation and retention. We will be rather looking for a modified use of our tape component, e.g., archiving, granular exchange restore, regulatory backups of accounting databases, etc.

Thank you

Arthur

[Gostev]

Correct. Thank you for this clarification.

[AJ83]

I would like to see the possibility to change the order of vm`s in a backup job aswell.

In our environment we have 2 locations and 2 job for each location.
job1: vss backups (Exchange/AD/SQL)
job2: non vss backups (other application servers)

I would like to have as less jobs as possible, for time reasons (1 vm directly after the other) and the deduplication ratio (more vm`s from same template in a job = better dedupe, right?).

Some machines however, have certain tasks to do at certain times during the night. So some machines a want in the beginning of the job, and some at the end.

It is possible to make this happen by adding the machines one by one from scratch. But that means that is have tot start from scratch if i want to add a machine to the beginning of a job.

[m.novelli]

I really need to specify VM backup order... please add this feature!

Thanks

Marco

[Daveyd]

+1 on the ability to choose

[Bunce]

Ditto. Seems we're getting quite a few requests in different threads for this feature..

[Libertas]

+1 on being able to choose the order of VMs to backup
This would help us greatly as we have overlapping backups and sometimes they time out because we have no control over which backup is trying to backup which VM, as we need to have 2 sets of backups to comply with retail PCI-Compiance. Would be great to have this for the next minor/major release. Thank you.

[TrevorBell]

Guys,

I know the feeling in this feature request and have asked the guys to seriously look at it

[willrodbard]

I would also really like to see this feature added as a hotfix or to the next version release, do it, go on, you know you want to!

[chamdor]

I had a customer ask for this today, they specifically needed one large VM to go first, what IS the algorithm today?

[Gostev]

I will find this out for you.

[AJ83]

Any new info on this Gostev?

Yesterday i needed to schedule imagelevel backups of a new machine with database software that is not VSS aware, so we must rely on the bck file being created before the image level backup. Strange thing is, i added the machine, and was happy it would be added to the end of this 20VM job, only to find out it would run as the first one.... Now i have an image level backup with a bck file that is of the night before I dont care about the specific time, just want to make sure it doesnt run before a certain time (before the bck file is created in the machine)

I don`t get why this simple feature wouldn`t be possible to implement.

[Gostev]

There's no algorithm. Just some random order, whatever order VI API or SQL database returns VM IDs - impossible to track down exactly, as this requires significant reseach effort, but we have no resources for this research right now due to the upcoming release.

[beckhamk]

i am surprised this hasnt been adde as a feature yet, very simple thing to add on the vb side. I asked for this back in the VB v2.0 days. Oh well - no worries Anton - i know it will get in there as you can see there is alot of interest in this.

[Oletho]

Count me in for the order feature request.

[ashm]

Me to. I have scripted our Zimbra Email server to stop it's services before the snapshot. It would be nice to have that VM at the top of the list so I know that for example at 3.30am everyday there will be a brief period of downtime.

[Gostev]

Hello all, this feature is scheduled for the next release.

[NightBird]

Me to. I have scripted our Zimbra Email server to stop it's services before the snapshot. It would be nice to have that VM at the top of the list so I know that for example at 3.30am everyday there will be a brief period of downtime.

Why not use VMware Tools custom quiescing script ?

[ashm]

Why not use VMware Tools custom quiescing script ?

That's what I am using. So say if I schedule our Backup job to run at 3.30am then if our Zimbra VM is the first VM to be backed up, I know that Zimbra will be down briefly at around 3.30am. Whereas at the moment it could end up being the last VM to be backed up later that morning and therefore potentially disrupt user access.

[NightBird]

Just reserve a backup job for your Zimbra Server.

[Bunce]

Just reserve a backup job for your Zimbra Server.

And lose the advantage of deduplication...

[xray6969]

[merged into existing discussion]

Hi!
I am trying to understand how does Veeam selects order of VMs when running backup job. As I cannot see any correlation between "Edit Replication" dialog list (which is alphabetical) and actual order of backup?

[bc07]

I would also like to have the feature to backup VMs in an order in a job. It could be similar to startup schedule in VMware where you have some VM's in a specific order and the rest in any order after it.

What do you mean with next release? Maintenance release in a few weeks or major release in several months?