Veeam Wishlist / Issues

[mdornfeld]

Cheers to tsighler's #4. Definately a lower priority then getting good backups/restores really fast, but if it's possible, this would be really nice. If it causes an inordinate amount of overhead to maintain the index, the only servers I'd really want this on would be my windows file servers. Taking this idea to the step of rediculous, it would also be nice to expose that index to users so they could get their own file restore from anything still on disk.

Btw Gustov, We're now on vSphere4 and my boss and VP already have the end of 3rd quarter penciled in for installing Veeam 4.0. Hope you're on schedule and the incremental works as good as you're saying it does! No pressure at all

[tsightler]

I'd agree that I wouldn't need this on every server, but a a checkbox that allowed the files for a given backup to be indexed would be great. We work around this on a fileserver level with Shadow Copy on our shared folders, but we can't keep a years worth this way. Basically I just need a way to locate a file or folder from a year ago and find the backup that it's on. We plan to implement a file archiving solution later this year which will probably make this much less of an issue, but it's still something we really miss from our old tape backups. Once again, understand the difficulties, but it doesn't seem impossible either.

[Gostev]

Tom,

1. Yes, fully agree here, this was brought up a few times already by various customers. We have been planning to add ability to restore back to running source Linux VM directly to resolve this... let me check the status - feature was tentatively scheduled for 4.0 release, but as low priority (meaning "if time and resources permit").

2. Ideally, this should not be needed to resolve one, but we wanted to add such ability anyway down the road for more flexibility with restores.

3. Where do you have the actual backup file stored, is it on remote Linux server by any chance?

4. Actually, we have been discussing this feature internally, so we definitely understand the need and use case. Good to see that this is needed by more than one customer. And it is logical feature to add as our product matures. My magic ball tells me "Outlook good" for this feature

[Gostev]

Taking this idea to the step of rediculous, it would also be nice to expose that index to users so they could get their own file restore from anything still on disk.

Good idea, and matches our discussions as well. We've been thinking on some sort of "Helpdesk webUI for file-level restores", but surely end users can be allowed to access that as well, being limited to their own content only.

Btw Gustov, We're now on vSphere4 and my boss and VP already have the end of 3rd quarter penciled in for installing Veeam 4.0. Hope you're on schedule and the incremental works as good as you're saying it does! No pressure at all

Yes, so far we look to be on schedule, and incrementals have been working well (in fact, it was the very first feature implemented). RTM is scheduled at the very end of Q3, so GA may be either end of September, or beginning of October (depending on how it aligns with other marketing activities). But you will be able to test drive it earlier. As always, we will have closed beta, and some most active community members (like you and Tom) will be invited. I am hoping to start the closed beta in about 2-3 weeks.

[tsightler]

Tom,
1. Yes, fully agree here, this was brought up a few times already by various customers. We have been planning to add ability to restore back to running source Linux VM directly to resolve this... let me check the status - feature was tentatively scheduled for 4.0 release, but as low priority (meaning "if time and resources permit").

2. Ideally, this should not be needed to resolve one, but we wanted to add such ability anyway down the road for more flexibility with restores.

#2 might not be needed, but we'd love to have the ability to restore from the command line without the GUI. We're a Windows averse company, when use Linux first, and Windows only when required, so we prefer tools that allow us to do things from Linux when possible.

3. Where do you have the actual backup file stored, is it on remote Linux server by any chance?

Locally attached disk (iSCSI connected). Restores of large files are very fast, I can restore a single 10GB file in a couple of minutes, but restores of a large number of files (10's of thousands) run very slow, especially with the VM restore appliance (required for Linux restores). It takes 5-10 minutes before it even does anything at all.

4. Actually, we have been discussing this feature internally, so we definitely understand the need and use case. Good to see that this is needed by more than one customer. And it is logical feature to add as our product mature. My magic ball tells me "Outlook good" for this feature

That's great to hear, we'll look forward to more news in the future.

[Gostev]

OK, I will ask Devs to perform some profiling to investigate the slowness. Our focus was individual file restores, and I am guessing such scenario with 10's of thousands of files restore wasn't even ever tested.

<offtopic>
I too nearly switched to Ubuntu 9.0.4 being tired and frustrated by Vista, but I have to admit Windows 7 took my heart. But server-wise (my personal servers), it is still Linux all the way for me.
</offtopic>

[Gostev]

Tom, I didn't yet have a chance to discuss the proper Linux FLR with the dev. lead because he is on sick leave. However, I was thinking more about this yesterday on my way home, and find out another possible solution to this: what if we restore selected files to Windows machine as a .tar file ? This is very easy to do for us, and I assume .tar should let us preserve the correct name, attributes and permissions? Then, you could copy the file back to Linux host using our built-in Linux file manager... we could even add "unpack" to tar files' context menu to make the solution more complete and automated.

[tsightler]

That would be fine as long as it solves the current problem we are having. The biggest issue we currently experience is that some files seem to be impossible to restore because they contain characters that are invalid in Windows filenames (at least we believe that to be the reason). This completely crashes restore process. Even simply allowing us to rename the files that fail, or at least skip the file and continue restoring the other files would be an improvement over the current situation.

I thought that a command line tool to mount VBK files might be easy because I suspect that's how the VM based restore appliance already works. Heck, I've considered trying to hack the thing myself. Our current workaround is, if we need to restore a large complex directory, we simply restore the entire VMDK file to the ESX host, mount it up to one of the Linux VM's, and copy the files over. Typically this is a very rare occurrence, however, it does happen, and is part of our DR testing procedures, so I have to have a way to do it reliably.

[Gostev]

Yes, tar should resolve the primary issue of invalid chars, and also help to preserve permissions and attribute. And we will also be looking at slowness when restoring multiple small files. VBK mounter for Linux might be good thing as well - we'll keep that in mind for when some of our Linux dev resources free up.

[mdornfeld]

Yes, so far we look to be on schedule, and incrementals have been working well (in fact, it was the very first feature implemented).

Just a quick question. Have your incremental "bit-level" tracking and fast backup speeds been tested with Virtual RDM's. If not, could you please test it and let me know. If it doesn't work, we're going to have to change our whole strategy going forward.

Thanks as always, Matt

[Gostev]

OK, I'll find out.

[pizang]

Some of them are already mentioned by I want to share some thoughts after some months of production use of Veeam Backup.

1. Option to disable/enable job
One day one of my iSCSI targets failed. There was no way to disable schedule because you couldn't move through job's properties as destination path was not found. Had to create a 'dummy' one.

2. Pre-backup script
As W2K has no VSS support and VMware tools has some problems with Oracle 9 and MSSQL 2000 I have to stop the database before backup. I do this by scheduling some BAT on a DB server. If I want to create job out of schedule I have to remember to stop/start database - very cumbersome.

3. Post backup script run after backup fail (maybe an option to force run or not)
If a backup fail post backup script is not fired. Am I right? In such a case my DB will not be started - ouch!

4. Run one job after another
Very useful when having one source and one target.

[Gostev]

Thanks for the feedback.

1. Available in Veeam Backup 4.0
2,3. I know that vast majority of customer are using VMware pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts to achieve this, have you considered?
4. So job chaining, OK. There's workaround for this right now, you can start the next job as a post-job activity for the previous one.

[pizang]

Gostev: thanks for a tip for points 2 and 3! I didn't considered this but it seems to be perfect for my needs.

[pizang]

I have tested VMware pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts. It works very well. The problem is that it works only in case you have Vmware Tools quiescence enabled. If you have VSS enabled there is no easy (is there?) way to have pre and post actions (like disabling VSS-unaware program etc.), so it would be profitable to have option 2 and 3 possible in future release.

[Gostev]

Can you please clarify why would you want to use both VSS and these scripts? I cannot imagine such scenario. Based on what you say above, you are using Windows 2000 which does not have VSS capabilities at all?

Also, no one typically deploys more than one production application app per VM, so it is very unlikely that someone will have (for instance) both Exchange and Oracle running on the same VM. Thus, scenario when someone would want to use Veeam VSS for Exchange but scripts for Oracle (on the same VM) is extremely unlikely. Do you agree?

Just to set some expectations: theoretically, it should be possible for our VSS integration code could call those scripts, but the priority of this feature would be very low given what I explained above. Remember, we have to prioritize each feature in our pool of 100+ pending features.

[tsightler]

I think it might be useful in cases where applications are not VSS aware. There are still many such applications running in our environment. Also, VMware Tools quiesce seems to be the worst of all options for any database type application. We still have a Windows 2000 server that runs Filemaker 5.5 server, and a Pervasive SQL database. Using VMware Tools quiesce creates database files that only restore about 25% of the time without performing some type of manual recovery. When we choose to not use VMware Tools quiesce the files are always able to be recovered automatically (similar to after a crash).

[withanh]

Another wish-list item I just thought of is the ability to do mailbox level restores. Even message level restores. Right now our Exchange is not virtualized so we are still using BackupExec to back it up. This gives me the ability to go back in time and pull even one individual email out of someone's mailbox and restore it.

[Gostev]

Darhl, this feature is already in our roadmap. I particularly like it because it allows us to leverage great Exchange expertise our dev team has. Many of us come from Aelita Software, which used to be leading Microsoft management vendor (we were named Microsoft's Partner of the Year 2 times!), and we used to make best tools for Exchange management. And one of our products was all about Exchange message-level recoveries

[withanh]

Sorry, been tied up. I'm glad to hear about the Exchange backup integration. Is that possibly a feature for the 4.x release? <color me hopeful>

h

[Gostev]

May be

[withanh]

If we're current on support, does that include software upgrades, or is it a new purchase to go to v4?

[Gostev]

Yes, all upgrades are "free" for customers on maintenance, including major releases. Since all new license purchases include 1 year of maintenance, you should be fine.

[ErikSi]

A wish list item for me is to quickly see which vm servers are backup up. Now i have to go in each job to see which vm's are in the job.
So maybe some kind of list with all the servers and in which job they belong..

Erik

[Gostev]

Erik, that's an easy one.

We already have such report in Veeam Backup 4.0 web UI.
And you can export it's content (as any other report) into Excel too.

[real_tarantoga]

Can you please clarify why would you want to use both VSS and these scripts? I cannot imagine such scenario. Based on what you say above, you are using Windows 2000 which does not have VSS capabilities at all?

oracle 8 may crash not only on win2k (it was a hard lesson to learn for me ) using vss without using a pre-freeze script which will set the db in online backup mode.

Just to set some expectations: theoretically, it should be possible for our VSS integration code could call those scripts, but the priority of this feature would be very low given what I explained above. Remember, we have to prioritize each feature in our pool of 100+ pending features.

The concerned (medical) db system is not portable at this time to a higher oracle release or os version. so, I repeat the question: will there be the possibility in the future release to launch pre or post backup scripts?

ps: I just switched our backup method away from ic cider to veeam backup - thank you for the almost perfect software. - r_t

[Gostev]

Yes, we will add this in the future releases. We are planning some minor modifications to VSS component down the road, and this is when we could add this functionality as well.

[withanh]

Hey Anton,

Is this still a valid wish list thread? I have an idea I'd like to see in the scheduler. Right now I can only schedule daily by the week, but in our backup scheme, we plan on taking a separate full backup on the last Saturday of the month to take as our offsite backup. So more flexibility in the scheduler. Kind of like how BackupExec handles scheduling. If you're not familiar with that I can take some screenshots to send so you see how it looks.

Thanks!

h

[Gostev]

Hi Darhl, yes I have BackupExec, no worries. We are adding monthly schedules to the next release. Thank you

[withanh]

Great to hear!