Surebackup linked jobs

[Steve_za]

Hi
I'm not sure if I'm missing something, but shouldn't you be able to link a Surebackup job to another Surebackup job? All I can do is link backup jobs, which doesn't help me as, as per Veeam recommendations, I group my backups by OS and application

What I would like to do
Have 3 (for the sake of this example) Application groups

DCs
CRM
ERP

The "Business Systems" Surebackup job kicks off and boots up the Domain Controllers in the DC application group.
Then the linked CRM job/aplication group boots up the CRM SQL server and then the application servers and tests them. It then shuts the CRM servers down
Then the second linked ERP job/application group boots up the ERP SQL Server and it's application and web servers and tests them, and shuts them down
Then the "Business Systems" Surebackup job shuts down the DC application group

The problem is if you have 20 VMs in a backup job, which I do, and it also contains the DCs, which mine do, you can't currently keep the DCs up for the full duration of all the sure backup jobs, unless you set the DC Job to keep the VMs running, which just introduces a manual step, which could prevent the next days backup from running, or you have multiple jobs booting the same DCs over and over again, which just wastes time

I hope this all makes sense.

Thanks
Steve

[fraack]

Hi Steve,

you have to build an application group for all your test scenarios. You can add multiple VMs in one application group. So for your example you may need to add a application group which contains DC, CRM, database server etc.
When you work with the linked job option you start your whole primary backup job. That may fits for simple testing. If you want to go deeper and keep your isolatet CRM system running you need to build an application group for it.

[blithespirit]

Just to elaborate further for you Steve, Florian is correct but maybe more of an explanation is good too. you need application groups for any vm you want keep running as a dependency such as DCs, CRM etc throughout the testing process. Create them first, you can add individual vms from your backups. Then in your surebackup job add the application groups into the wizard, the next part of the wizard is for linked jobs which are the vm backups you want to test, when the surebackup runs the application group stays running throughout the linked jobs rotation and shuts down after all the vms in the linked group have been run.
I hope that adds to Florians explanation for you.

[Steve_za]

Yep I see that, but it just seems like a silly way of doing things....
I might have 50 VMs in a backup job, because they are all the same operating system, but I may only want to test 20 of those VMs.
It would be great if instead of only being able to link a backup job, you could link an application group. That way you could test the exact machines you want.
Something for Veeam to think about for the next feature update!
Currently I will have to boot my DC 4 or 5 times for each application group, which wastes about an hour of test time.

Thanks