SureBackup Feature Requests

[JoshuaPostSAMC]

I've been working with SureBackup for several months now and have most of my issues worked through, but have several annoyances and areas of improvement I wanted to share for Feature Requests

1. Unable to change order of linked jobs and seems to randomly change
When adding a linked backup job to a SureBackup job, the order of the VMs is seemly random with every execution, and even the order of the linked jobs seems to be random. Example: I add my SQL Backup jobs to the Linked Jobs list first so they are tested first, but they can appear anywhere in the SureBackup execution

2. Unable to edit multiple linked jobs at the same time
I have often needed to adjust the Startup Options values on multiple linked jobs, but unable to do them in bulk through the GUI, making me need to click on a linked job>Edit>Startup Options, make my changes, click ok, repeat over and over.
Similarly if I’m doing maintenance on a Virtual Lab and need to reassign multiple SureBackup jobs to a different lab, or want to edit any other setting, I’m unable to do so in the GUI, although I probably could with Powershell

3. No retry of failed Application Group
It is increasingly frustrating when I come in first thing in the morning and see that SureBackup isn’t running because one of the 6 VMs in the application group failed a Domain Controller script at 1:00 am and after a single failure it completely aborts the entire job. There should be some retry settings, both at the script level, so it can have a few more minutes to be ready, and at the VM level to retry that entire VM in case the system was overloaded at that exact moment. I would also like to see “Reboot VM” as an option, as sometimes I see a VM that SureBackup hasn’t seen as fully booted, but I can log into it and see that it is running and a simple reboot of the VM would help that along

4. No simultaneous start of Application Group
There needs to be some level of tiering at the Application Group level to allow multiple VMs to start at the same time. In my situation, I have two domains with 3 Domain Controllers each that I need to boot as part of my Application Group. Rather than waiting for 6 sequential VMs to power on, it really could be 2 power on at the same time (one DC from each domain with Authoritative Restore) and after those are on, boot the remaining 4 all at the same time as Non-Authoritative Restores and then the full application group would be online.

5. Unable to exclude a VM
I have some VMs in a linked job that I know will never boot in SureBackup due to RDMs that aren’t present, silly IP configurations, such as a non-routable IP on the first NIC, or Linux setups that don’t properly initialize the NIC on a SureBackup boot. Since I am aware these will fail, I’ve disabled all tests (VMTools and Ping) but SureBackup is still testing for something and eventually reports a Failure
As a result, I’ve learned to just ignore most of the report I get, because I know they will always have some failures, and in the end, I’ll eventually overlook a legitimate error, thinking it is related to one of the known VMs that I can’t exclude
Adding a way to exclude or just not test the VM so it always shows a Success would correct this issue

6. Powershell limited in what it can do inside of a job, such as list/import Advanced Linked Job VM settings, and clone a Virtual Lab
I have added several Linked Jobs to my SureBackup job, but there are individual VMs that need extra scripts, different timeouts, etc, but there is currently no way to access this through Powershell as far as I can tell. I built all of my SureBackup jobs one to one to match each Backup job so I could test smaller chunks, and eventually rolled them all into 2 large SureBackup jobs, but I couldn’t easily move all my Advanced settings into the large job and had to do it stare-n-compare.
I also have needed to clone a Virtual Lab more than once as I have two datacenters I wanted to run tests from and with 9 vNICs and multiple mappings and DHCP settings, it takes 20-30 minutes to build one from scratch with proper documentation, and very easy to mistype a character. Powershell should have a way to copy/Clone a virtual lab to run on a different host/cluster so I don’t have to keep manually rebuilding them

7. A single Backup job running/merging during a SureBackup job that includes it in a linked job results in the entire SureBackup job stopping, even those VMs not part of the job that started
Most of my jobs run once a day and SureBackup starts after the last job completes, but Exchange and File Servers run twice a day. If the SureBackup job that contained the Linked Exchange and File Server job is still running when the second execution of this backup job begins, even if SureBackup has completed tests on all the VMs in this job, the entire SureBackup job is abandoned when the merge starts. I’ve had to break these out into their own separate SureBackup job to run later in the day after the second backup execution.

[JoshuaPostSAMC]

Hmm. No comments from anyone...

[foggy]

Thanks, Joshua, your feedback is accepted. Some of the requests are not new though (here's the one regarding VM exclusions, for example). I'm also not sure if linked jobs are indeed processed randomly. VMs within the jobs - yes, but jobs themselves should meet the order in which they are added to the list. But anyway, thanks for the detailed explanations.

[Moebius]

I second Joshua's requests above.
In particular, the possibility of excluding some VMs in a linked job from being tested has been requested several times, and since long time, but as of today - no joy.

I've been dealing and pulling my hair with Surebackup since it appeared in B&R. I see it as one of the best features of the product, yet I've always had the impression that this is Veeam's neglected child.

[DaveWatkins]

4. No simultaneous start of Application Group
There needs to be some level of tiering at the Application Group level to allow multiple VMs to start at the same time. In my situation, I have two domains with 3 Domain Controllers each that I need to boot as part of my Application Group. Rather than waiting for 6 sequential VMs to power on, it really could be 2 power on at the same time (one DC from each domain with Authoritative Restore) and after those are on, boot the remaining 4 all at the same time as Non-Authoritative Restores and then the full application group would be online.

This one could also be used to get around VM's in a cluster (exchange, SQL etc) where the services don't become available until the cluster is up. At the moment I haven't found a way for SureBackup to do application test because it does them when the VM boots only, not once a set of VM's have booted

[chrisit]

Can you guys please try and implement these? What is the hold up? this is here for last 2 years...

[foggy]

Hi Chris, what specific request(s) are you talking about? Please note, that all the features are prioritized based on the number of requests and value to the product, so the only hold up is the priority.