Enhancement - Ability to have Labs run on proxy or survive reboot

[Coldfirex]

Howdy,
We make very extensive use of several large Virtual Labs in our environment. It has become a major pain point with our monthly maintenance of rebooting the Veeam server since it destroys the Labs and we have to start them back-up, re-input our testing changes, etc. I would like to request a way to make this easier.
Maybe an option to "migrate" the Lab to a Proxy server or the ability to save a Labs state during a maintenance window?

[karsten123]

Hi Alan,
how do you achieve this long runtime? In our environments, the on-demand sandbox shuts down everytime, the backup changes something on the underlying files.
thanks.
Karsten

[Coldfirex]

We utilize storage snapshots. Its not that we regularly run labs that are up for longer than a month (usually), but that we run several that have different creation\start times.

[Coldfirex]

Is this a valid request or are there existing ways around this issue already?

[theta12]

It is a valid request and one that I've asked before. We have the same issue in the fact that some times we have a surebackup lab running for a couple of days while we wait for verification from multiple parties to confirm patches/changes didn't break things. Some times, these labs have been up for a week or more and it REALLY stinks to have to explain to the end users who have already completed the changes that they have to completely re-do all of the changes and testing again. I've been reamed out a couple of times for this already.

The only way I can make this work is to create the Surebackup lab so that the proxy appliance is created on my ESXi host, then I have to manually create clones of the production VM's we need to test and attach their network adapters to the proxy. This is the only way to remove the functional requirement of having to have the Veeam service running on the VB&R server. It's manually intensive, but it works.

[Coldfirex]

Thanks for replying. Glad Im not the only one with this pain point. We made a decision to limit our "test" servers and use Labs in their place.
That is an interesting workaround, though I agree not as user friendly as using a lab.

Hopefully Veeam support can comment!

[PetrM]

Hi Alan,

The request is noted but we need to track the number of similar requests prior to decide on the feasibility of adding such feature to our roadmap. Anyway, many thanks for your input!

Please don't forget to share the support case ID with us.

Thanks!

[Coldfirex]

Thanks for the reply.
Do we need to enter a support case for feature requests, to post the ID here? I thought that was just for technical issues.

[PetrM]

Yes, you may share it anyway for our reference.

Thanks!

[Coldfirex]

Case #04410240 opened.