Feature REQ: Failover to crash consistent from VMware to

[makoto.climb]

Now, if we backup VM with VMware tools quiescence and it is failed by VMware tools problem, the backup is failed.
But in this case, we want to ignore VMware tools problem and retrive VM backup.

I think that it is difficult to ignore failure like Application-aware processing, however could you add an option to fail over to a crash consistent backup when retrying?

[billcouper]

Hi,

In some cases we have Hosted Customer backups where we cannot enable Guest Interaction for application aware processing. This could be for many reasons including but not limited to:
* Customer doesn't want to provide us credentials
* Customer doesn't want firewall ports to be opened

In these cases we can enable VMware Tools quiescence in the job settings, which is better than nothing at all, right?
If a customer vm fails to back up 3 times in a row with VMware Tools quiescence, there is no backup of that server.
If a customer has 10 vm's and only 1 fails, we cannot exclude the 1 server, instead we have to turn off quiescence at the job level.

To work around this issue I have a powershell script that detects jobs that failed due to VMware Tools quiescence issues, and re-runs them with quiescence disabled (and then re-enables quiescence after it's done). This is reliable but less than ideal. There are multiple negative side effects of this entire process that are too long winded to mention here.

There are two things that would benefit us in these cases:
1) Ability to selectively exclude individual VM's from having VMware Tools quiescence utilized
2) Option to revert to non-quiesced backup after n fails

[PTide]

Hi,

If understood everything correctly, enabling both AAIP and quiescence at the same time will address the issues in the following manner:

1) Ability to selectively exclude individual VM's from having VMware Tools quiescence utilized

With both AAIP and quiescence enabled the job will attempt to process the guest with AAIP and will failover to quiescence for those VMs where AAIP has failed.

2) Option to revert to non-quiesced backup after n fails

If you choose "Try, but ignore failures" in AAIP settings, then it will still perform backup if quiescence fails.

* Customer doesn't want firewall ports to be opened

Have you considered using VIX for that?

Thanks

[billcouper]

Thanks for the reply PTide.

VIX could get us around the firewall ports issue, but what if the customer will not provide us credentials?

I'm aware of the AAIP setting to 'Try, but ignore failures' and do use that when it is possible.
However, AAIP requires Administrator credentials on the customer VM, which we will not always have access to.
Guest Processing - User Account for Guest Processing

[PTide]

Right, the request makes sense.

Thank you for your feedback.

[GabGoe]

Hello,

Sorry for reviving this topic but we have the same problem. We have to backup many servers where we don't have credentials for AAIP. Also many of these servers are not even running a supported application for AAIP. So we are using VMware Tools quiescence to get consistent backups.

In very rare cases these backups fail because of quiescence errors which is an issue especially for monthly or yearly GFS backups with longer retention. These backups are also copied to tape so it is even harder to add the backups of the missing VMs afterwards.

It would be very helpful to select an option to skip quiescence maybe in the last or n+1 retry of the job. Even if this means to have only an crash-consistent backup of these VMs. Maybe there is such an option in V12?

Thanks

[PetrM]

Hello and Welcome to Veeam R&D Forums!

We'll need to analyze similar cases a bit deeper to clarify whether such a request's value is high enough to justify the required engineering resources to deliver this mechanism in our future releases. Anyway, the request is noted but we cannot comment on ETA.

Thanks!