Feedback on B&R 6.1

[rawtaz]

Hi,

Thought I'd just throw in my initial feelings after having used 6.1 for an hour. Maybe others have feedback as well.

Good:

- Having right-clicked a backup job and accidentally chosen "Full" instead of "Start" in 6.0, I appreciate that you have now moved the "Full" further down and away from the top-most "Start" in 6.1, so there's less risk that you click the wrong thing.

- Having been in a situation where I couldn't find a way to right-click stuff in the GIU, I appreciate that you have added regular buttons in the action bar, by which you can Start a job by a regular click on it.

Bad:

- I think the old layout was way better in terms of getting an overview. In 6.0 I could easily see all my servers, repositories, jobs, etc. Now in 6.1 I can't see it all at one glance, I need to switch between different views, and that just complicates things. Thumbs down

- If HotAdd fails for a job, we don't get an indication about that anymore. In 6.0 it emitted a warning (with a yellow warning sign), but now it just puts a notice in the "Statistics" for a job and it does not change the status from Successful. The problem here is that now, even if my jobs DO back up successfully by falling back to network mode, having non-working HotAdd and not knowing about it can mean that when at some point I need to restore a VM, it will take much longer than if I had HotAdd working.
I think a compromise would be good; The job should overall be considered successful, but the notice in the statistics should have a little white+blue "information" icon (like "(i)"). That way we can easily spot deviations from the normal state (which working HotAdd would be considered to be, if you have it enabled for a job/VM).
Bottom line; If HotAdd is not working, I want to know about it as it may impact performance when I really need it, and I'm not getting that information as it is now in 6.1.

Thanks for reading!

[dellock6]

That's funny indeed: hotadd failure and failover to network mode was downgraded to info instead of warning right because many people even in these forums asked for it ,and now you ask the opposite

[rawtaz]

Hehe

When you say it was downgraded to "info", then by "info" you mean the same level of green-marked messages that most other informational ones in the statistics are, right?

I think it is fine that the messages don't emit a warning that marks the job as failed. I think the job should be marked as successful, but with the slight difference that the icon for it in the history should be a (i) one, as well as the specific line mentioning the fall-back to network mode in the statistics for the job. That way we can see if there's anything in the backups that are not 100% ideal, by just checking the history.

My guess is this: People who have a big environment with a great network, HA, and other resources don't care much whether the jobs use network mode or HotAdd. While smaller environments like mine is where it actually can be noticeable.

[dellock6]

Yeah, you supposed right.
And also your guess is correct: at our DC is better to have many jobs marked as successful, since the backup was completed anyway, than having to take a look at all those "false positives". Anyway, in big environments is better to use enterprise manager and have the daily summary, and go to check single jobs only if they return an error.

[rawtaz]

If we had more configuration settings this would be a no-brainer. Let us choose what we want to classify as failures/warnings/notices/success, so it can suit everyone

[Gmc85]

I think we should have an option to mark those sort of events (Failiure of SAN/Hotadd failing over to network mode) as either info or warning as per our own choice rather than it being a global thing.

I have to say I do much prefer the GUI compared to v5/6. Keep the improvements coming Veeam dev's

Oh and I'm so glad you guys included the "Map Backup" feature, having to re-run some big VM's if something happened to the job was a bit irritating!