SureBackup, do you use it? All VMs? How often?

[HendersonD]

We are new to Veeam, just got it up and running about 6 weeks ago. We are using it to backup about 40 production VMs under ESXi 6.0. We are also using it to replicate our 15 most important VMs to our DR site. There seems to be a good bit of work to setting up SureBackup

1. Do you SureBackup? If yes, is it working well for you?
2. Do you test all of the VMs you backup or replicate?
3. How often do you run SureBackup jobs?

[foggy]

This might be a captain-obvious statement, but it entirely depends on your requirements rather than on what others typically do. Yes, people do SureBackup (and will probably chime in with their stories, otherwise you could just search the forums for existing posts about that) and I recommend to check at least your 15 most important VMs on a daily basis. Just to be sure you're on the safe side and be able to recover with minimum data loss in case the need be.

[phlight]

1. Yes, I had some problems early on but once I upgraded my offsite VM host it's been well.
2. All VMs (17)
3. Daily

I use ONE to email me a report in the morning to let me know if it passed or not.

[HendersonD]

How long does your SureBackup job of 17 VMs take?
Do you have all 17 VMs in one application pool?

[phlight]

1. About 2 hours.
2. One application pool.

[JoshuaPostSAMC]

1) I'm in the middle of setting it up now. It did seem cumbersome, but once I started understanding what I was doing with configuring the Virtual Lab, it really isn't that much to do. Mapping all of the networks and masquerade addresses takes some time. Once the lab is setup, creating a SureBackup job isn't too bad. Create an application group with at least one Domain Controller and maybe a critical SQL server that other servers rely on. Then link it to backup jobs so all other VMs are tested.
2) I have 500+ VMs being backed up in 18 jobs. Since I'm linking the backups jobs. I am running a test against all of the VMs eventually, but some just don't work well in SureBackup due to a Server 2008 (R2) bug with VMXNET3 adapters not keeping their static IP when replicating or doing Surebackup. So I get failures logged, when they aren't really, so the reliability of a report is questionable.
3) For management I'm saying I'm going to test the restores quarterly, but realistically I'm planning on running the jobs every 2 weeks and we keep 31 restore points of once a day backups, so I'll be testing twice a month. Once I see how long the job takes, maybe I"ll do it once a week.

[tdewin]

2) I have 500+ VMs being backed up in 18 jobs. Since I'm linking the backups jobs. I am running a test against all of the VMs eventually, but some just don't work well in SureBackup due to a Server 2008 (R2) bug with VMXNET3 adapters not keeping their static IP when replicating or doing Surebackup. So I get failures logged, when they aren't really, so the reliability of a report is questionable.

Well you might think it is questionable, but really if you would do a replica, you might encounter the same issue. So it actually indicates that you should install the correct windows patch to fix the problem permantely:
https://www.veeam.com/kb1601

[JoshuaPostSAMC]

I agree with this, and right now I'm collecting the list of servers this impacts so we can be aware of the risks, but I'm more indicating the VMs that SureBackup reports as never booting the OS, but I can login and see the VM operational and I can log into this isolated VM and see it is working. Support is indicating I should uninstall and reinstall VMware Tools which I'm in the middle of testing, but all other aspects of the tools are working, so I don't trust the "Fail" as a true fail. And there is no option to exclude a VM from a SureBackup test when using Linked Jobs.