Difficulties using the U-Air wizards without Enterprise Mgr

[Moebius]

I am confused about the proper way to use the U-AIR wizards when there is no Enterprise Manager. I am talking about the AD, Exchange and SQL wizards. (My Exchange is still 2007, so no Exchange Explorer possible.)

As I understand it, I need to have a SureBackup job that already ran on that specific day for which I need to retrieve application objects. If the SB had already run that day, I can open the Statistics of the relevant session from the History, right-click the vm I need to run the wizard on, and click Start. The SB then restarts in troubleshooting mode, starts the Application Group and then the vm that I clicked. Once this mini-surebackup job is done my vm is still powered on and the context menu offers to run the wizards. This is all good.

The problem arises when I do daily backups but only occasional SureBackups of some vms. The above procedure does not allow to choose a date for the troubleshooting mode other than the same date of that very session. If I run daily backups of machine X but only run surebackups on sundays and I need to restore objects from the (say) wednesday backup, then I'm out of luck.

This does not appear to make sense, since the restore points to start the vm for the day that the wizard needs are already there. Why on earth is a whole surebackup session of that day needed? It seems to me this limitation comes only from the way this procedure is designed.

The only workaround I found to this situation is to run a SB on the fly using the "Start to..." option. But this way I have to let the whole SB job run to its completion, THEN restart the job again in troubleshooting mode. Most of my jobs contain dozens of vm each and the SB job alone takes hours to complete. This is not a viable solution in many cases.

Hopefully the answer to the problem isn't "run surebackup every day"...

[tsightler]

My suggestion is to simply setup an additional SB job that includes only the VMs needed for each one of your common recovery scenarios. For example to recover Exchange, create a sure backup job that includes an app group that is just a DC and the Exchange server. This SB job doesn't need to be linked to any jobs, just the single app group with the VMs you need to recover and you should also select the "keep running" after completion option. The job should not be scheduled to ever run automatically, you'll only ever run it manually when you need to do a recovery. It can be assigned to use resources in the same vLab as your normal, scheduled SB job, but since that job only has the VMs you need for recovery, you can use the "Start to" function to start it manually to any point int time, perform your recovery, and then stop the job.

[Moebius]

Thanks Tom. I concur this is a decent workaround. However, why wouldn't it be possible to give the options to "Start to..." a different date directly from any SB session statistics, making the procedure much simpler?
I cannot see any reasons that prevent this. A possible feature request?

[foggy]

Lucio, thanks for the feedback. However, I would note that SureBackup job troubleshooting mode you're talking about was introduced mostly for the ability to verify the reason of the entire SureBackup job failure (that's why it doesn't imply restore point selection), while application group with the "keep running" check box allows to easily perform exactly what you're after. Thanks.