SureBackup Verification strikes again

[TitaniumCoder477]

I'm going to "beat a dead horse" here.

The reason we don't even talk about SureBackup Verification with any of our clients is because (1) it's a great idea that is poorly implemented, (2) it ALWAYS ends up being a blackhole of time, (3) and support is very limited in what help they can offer.

Case and point: I'm trying to enable the native SQL testing, and it hasn't worked once nor produced informative messaging. I ended up having to open a ticket with support to even understand what the problem might be. "6/2/2021 7:52:36 PM Error Predefined script 1: name Sql Server, error code 1"

Support had me run the Veeam.Backup.SqlChecker.vbs script manually. This unveiled the fact domain service creds could not be used, so I setup SQL creds instead which worked! Yay--case closed, right? Wrong. The SB job continued to fail. Support then told me that the script is failing on sc \\XYZDBSERVER query. "Access denied" So through much testing today, I have proven the problem to be that sc is only allowed for remote access from endpoints on the same domain. All of our clients' backup servers are disjoined from the domain by design, as one of the steps in "hardening" the backup server. As a result, when the backup server (non-domain joined) is attempting to run sc \\XYZDBSERVER query, it gets an access denied. That is because XYZDBSERVER is one of the many domain-joined servers. It refuses an iteration of all its services by an "untrusted" device. This is completely understandable.

Here is my personal opinion--Veeam should (1) not be using a VBS script which hails back to the Server 2000 era. We're a long way from that. Veeam should be using PowerShell to accomplish this testing, (2) the script and/or Application Group is not flexible enough to support the varying testing needs. For instance, we can test against the instance just fine. That is, cscript "C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Backup\Veeam.Backup.SqlChecker.vbs" XYZDBSERVER\SQL_ENZO veeam_services [PWD REDACTED] works just fine. But Veeam won't run against just the selected/desired instances. That is, the Application Group won't let me just specify the instances I want to test and then access those directly. Rather, Veeam must iterate them itself, which won't work because it doesn't have access by design. And (3) this is yet again why I do not recommend SureBackup Verification to any of our clients, nor do we set it up by default. It's a great idea but very poorly implemented. As I said before, I have sunk DAYS into trying to get basic stuff working that, with other competitor products like Datto, come working out of the box. Aside from hacking the VBS script myself, I don't see a solution to this problem at the moment. Thoughts?

[Gostev]

You are right, those are merely sample scripts from the early days. When we released SureBackup over 10 years ago, we quickly saw that most people create their own script for their specific environment and testing requirements. And we observed such a big variety of them appear quickly that we decided it makes little sense to try and create and then maintain some "universal" script that will not be very useful to many. Just as you said "not flexible enough to support the varying testing needs".

Besides, application testing is not our core business anyway, we're a backup and recovery vendor. We'd rather invest our limited R&D resources in building more "great ideas" that enables customers to do amazing things, as opposed to sink in having to create, maintain and update those application test scripts. Which most customers will still need to adjust to their environment.

So basically right or wrong, our strategy has been to leave it to the community to create and exchange test scripts for the testing of different applications, and by now there are tons of samples on the Internet (random link search for SureBackup). And I know many service providers like yourself who provide value-add services to their clients that involve backup recoverability testing tailored to particular customer's requirements. They certainly don't use sample scripts and yes, they probably spent some time building their offering - but now this is their strongest differentiator comparing to what service providers with competing offerings can offer in terms of depth of verification.

I don't really know what to advise you here, if you feel scripting is not for you. In general, SureBackup is pretty advanced functionality and it cannot be used to its fullest extent without "getting hands dirty". If you don't want to be doing this, then perhaps you're right not to offer this to your clients.

But you certainly don't have to use VBS though, as SureBackup supported your desired PowerShell test scripts since day 1.

[TitaniumCoder477]

That's actually exactly the reply I needed! Clear admission that this isn't Veeam's focus but basically a recommendation to explore what the community has to offer. I didn't even think about the possibility there might be a community and these native scripts might just be samples. (I would suggest maybe a documentation update to this end) That said, automation through PowerShell is the other half of my day job. I just don't have time to script everything! (especially functionality I misunderstood to be functional out the box) I will do some research along this new avenue of though in the new week. Thanks!