Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

[paul.hugill]

I'd also like the ability to exclude a VM from a SureBackup job that uses linked jobs for the reasons mentioned.
-Showing the job as failed can lead to people being failure numb and things getting missed
-Creating a separate backup job purely to manage SureBackup linked jobs seems a little silly on site with 600 VM's

Please can it be included in v10?

[crackocain]

If you want to stable Surebackup You have to seperate 600 backup jobs have to success it. Then add linked jobs to Surebackup job.

This feature is have to come.

[Moebius]

So, do I get it right that not even v10 will offer the possibility of exluding VMs (in Linked Jobs) from SureBackup?

Come on Veeam, this has been requested many times and since long time. Is this really that hard?

[YouGotServered]

+1 to this as well. A simple and intuitive way to exclude VMs would be awesome. I expect more people will want this feature as more people begin to test their backups with SureBackup (in my experience, SureBackup has been woefully underutilized).

[rnelson0]

I, too, would love to see "Exclude VM(s) from this SureBackup job" added as a feature.

It has been mentioned a few times that you have to do manual effort either way. In my case, I have a variable number of VMs in a backup job (it changes overtime) and one CONSTANT member of the group that should be excluded. The manual effort to create application groups would be endless effort. The manual effort to exclude a single VM, once, would be an exceedingly small and finite effort.

Because of this, I have a job that runs that has 1 failed VM every night and the rest succeed. At this point, I'll just deal with it, it lets me know the SureBackup job runs, but it is really annoying.

[sgarbe]

+1 FR
This is a very important feature!

[gosnells]

+1

[Dima P.]

Hello folks,

Thank you for bringing this topic up. I've added your votes to this feature request. Cheers!

[crackocain]

First request message: Tue Nov 13, 2012

I don't think it's hard enough to wait 6 years.
We represent at least 100 customers through sales and demos so far. At the end-user side, it's our job to configure it. We have a complaint about that. If requested, I can ask the company staff to send an e-mail with a request letter. Application groups serve a completely different purpose and we use it when necessary. Therefore, it is quite obvious that using SureBackup in the most effective way would be this way: SureBackup Exclusion.

At least the authors who write here agree. Can you specify a date to provide this feature? Is it possible to come in version 10?

[foggy]

We do not prioritize features by the date when they were first requested, we use other factors like demand and value to the product. Your feedback is really appreciated and some features do get implemented after being heavily pushed by the community, but we do not share any estimations for a feature until we're 100% positive it is implemented and will be delivered, so cannot set any expectations for this one at the moment.

[crackocain]

Hi Alex

Actually Surebackup Exclusion add great value to the product.

Because it is set SureBackup so hard, people cannot use proper licensing, so they can't give feedback. The reason I fall so much on this is that I want the product to be more useful. It is also very difficult to sell to the customer because it is set in this way. Let's talk openly that none of the customers with hundreds of virtual machines wants to configure it this way.

Of course this is my opinion, but I have been supporting the end user for the sale and support of this product for 6 years. I want you to be sure that this feature is really preventing the full use of your product.

If you're not hear complaining about this, satisfied customers from SureBackup are working with hundreds of backup tasks and dozens of application groups. Simplified and automated backup architecture with less task, cannot implement it.

Thank you

[Moebius]

I agree 100% with Mehmet. This feature has been requested for a very long time and, quite frankly, to the layman it doesn't look so hard to implement (yeah, I know, "you don't know what goes on behind the scenes" and so on, but still...).

I even had to recourse to creating separate backup jobs where I transferred the VMs that don't have to go through Surebackup in order to let SB do its job. A nuisance to say the least, especially when these VMs were already included in the original job.

But, as it has often be noted, SureBackup has always been (and still is) neglected by Veeam. It's so easy to see that, even looking at how the console interfaces behave differently when it comes to SB.
It's a real shame, as I have always deemed SureBackup to be one of the main assets of Veeam vs. its competition. I even believe that the vast majority of Veeam users does not make use of it because they cannot see the real value of it, or find it too hard to set up, or---after banging their heads against incongruences like the one we're discussing---reckon that it must be the child of a lesser god.

[rnelson0]

At the end-user side, it's our job to configure it.

And because this feature is lacking, I barely use SureBackup now. I have ~300 VMs across 5 jobs, and I only run SureBackup on the smallest job because it creates the least errors. Adding it to the others at this point would just generate tons of errors and filtering through those really destroys the value of automated backup testing. This is why that ability is so important, so I can use SureBackup *at all*.

[zoltank]

SureBackup had always felt like a second hand citizen with Veeam when it really is an amazing tool which differentiates Veeam from other backup vendors. I really wish they'd give it a little love instead of just rolling out new features.

Please, please, please give us this. We've been asking for it for so long and it would make SureBackup much for usable for those of us backing up more than just a couple VMs. Honestly, I'm still amazed this feature want included in SureBackup from the beginning.

[rossthorne]

Good afternoon, after reading through this thread I would like to know if there has been any consideration in expanding the capabilities and customization of SureBackup to allow for more granular jobs? I currently backup 2000+ VMs and would like to test only against certain groups of VMs vs the entire job with 100+ VMs in it.

For example, there are VMs that require recovery testing for audit purposes that we would like to test without creating all of these application groups that require all VMs to be powered on. Is there any word that this might become available down the road? I personally would like to see the ability to add groups of VMs to the job as well as linked Jobs.

For Example, you could create a VM Group that is a group of VMs that you choose manually that you can run in the testable VMs. This would allow to test groups of application specific VMs. Even better would be the ability to choose the VM by VMware tag, you could then choose which job the VM would be tested from in a wizard. This would be a great feature for organizations of all sizes.

Thank you!

[AlexB82]

^^ This would be useful !! The ability to select a backup job and either have exclusions on it, or be able to look at the VM Tags to specfy whether it's added to the SureBackup "playlist".

[tom_nl]

^^ Agree. We don't use surebackup now because this feature is missing.

[crackocain]

Yeah.

I sell Enterprise and Enterprise Plus version about 54 customer. Only 5 of them using SureBackup this situation.

[Frosty]

If it comes to a vote, yes, I would agree that the ability to either selectively Include (just pick the VMs you want from the backup) or Exclude (do all VMs except the ones selected) would be a very handy capability. At the moment I do use SureBackup, but I have to "do everything" including a lot of test VMs and so on.

[Alec King]

If you wish to have full granular control over SureBackup (and SureReplica) Virtual Labs, please take a look at Veeam Availability Orchestrator 2.0.
It has very flexible configuration for both recovery and testing, by using groups of VMs in orchestration plans.
The VM Groups that will be tested are controlled by vSphere tags, and Veeam ONE Business View groups can also be used.

v1.0 of Veeam Orchestrator worked with Veeam replicas. v2.0 will work with Veeam backups as well, and instant VM recovery is fully supported. This will allow total control of the Virtual Lab environment.

Veeam Orchestrator 2.0 will release very soon (a few weeks!)

[crackocain]

Hi Alex

This feature solves nothing for bought Enterprise license customers. VAO use only Enterprise Plus licensing. Enterprise Plus owners also pay VAO per VM.

What do we have to tell the customer? Upgrade to a higher license to use a feature that you have difficulty using. Also purchase an additional separate product. And also configure another VM and learn another product to use.

I can't explain this to my client. When a product that can be backup testing exclusion in the future or better using, the customer passes to the competitor brand.

I don't think that this approach is great for Veeam.

[rnelson0]

Alec, would VAO be able to meet this criteria? Run Surebackup against Job X when Job X completes, but exclude VM Y. I don't want to select VMs, I want that to be dynamic, but I do want selected exclusions (based on specific VM ID, a pattern match of the name, datastore/datacenter/folder it's stored in, etc).

There are obviously concerns about licensing, but first I'd like to understand if it even meets my needs.

[Alec King]

Hi Rob,
Yes, this is the flexibility that VAO gives you.
Note that VAO does not run a SureBackup job at all; in fact VAO has granular control over the Veeam B&R server, and uses direct interface via PowerShell to orchestrate the lab and the VMs that will be tested. So VAO is completely independent of backup jobs.

VAO has an API which you can trigger via script when a Veeam B&R job completes.

Either vSphere tags, or Veeam ONE Business View groups, can be used to manage the VM Groups. And ONE has all the abilities to dynamically manage groups as you describe above (VM name matching, datastore, folder, etc etc)

[SBarrett847]

Another +1 for excluding VMs from Linked Jobs in Surebackup. Or allowing Individual VMs to be Linked.

[Crashinit]

+1 for me too.
I have over 200 VM's to test and excluding VM's in SureBackup will Sure be great.

[nc2500]

This is sad. It's never going to happen.

[mikeely]

How is this still not a thing? Come on, just let us add excludes.

[Dima P.]

Hello folks,

Thank you for sharing your requests. I've added your votes to this feature requests but cant share any ETA at the moment. Cheers!

[crackocain]

I want to add Exclusions button for fun. Let's settle with this. I think this feature will add 8 years later.

Oh God, this looks sharp. It is burning. We are able to exclude disks and templates also. Very useful.

[mikeely]

So here's the only way I can make this work in my environment, and you'll see how the lack of the Exclude option makes SureBackup nearly worthless.

First, our backup environment:
We have two primary sites. Each site has about 100-150 VMs being backed up. Our approach to backing up is for each site we have one large backup job which is assigned to back up the entire cluster. Then when we get machines that can't work for that job (e.g.: SQL servers ugh) we add those few VMs to Exclusions from that large backup job. This works just fine and is very much in line with the KISS method: when a VM is created it just gets backed up automagically and if there's a problem it'll show up in our monitoring the next day and somebody fixes the issue either by getting vmtools working (99% of the time this is the problem) or figuring out whether to back the VM up separately or make some other change to the VM so it Just Works. After this, we've got several other things going on with backups being sent to the other site and to the cloud etc that aren't relevant here...

I should mention we have a very complex network infrastructure with tons of VLANs and ACLs and whatnot. Not too unusual either, but it sure makes setting up SureBackup a lot harder to do (and don't get me started on the disaster that is getting Windows Veeam components, and all their myriad of required ports and protocols, to talk to one another through all this - that's a separate gripe I've shared elsewhere on these forums). So for SureBackup, the Linked Jobs option seems like the right choice and should be. We can just link the giant backup job, limit it to 3 VMs at a time, and let 'er rip. I've done this, it worked pretty well... EXCEPT: there are many VMs which, for reasons related to the aforementioned network topology, won't come up right in the generic SureBackup environment. Some of these I can iron out by modifying the virtual lab but there are some that just aren't going to work. So the solution /should/ be just exclude those VMs from SureBackup and for anything important enough in that list schedule manual backup validation.

Nope. Best advice I have been offered is to create application groups small enough to run in individual jobs and attach each to its own SureBackup job. Tried that, and UGH NO WAY! One of our clusters is pretty busy so the idea of spinning up even 10 VMs on a single host is Not An Option. I figured this out after trying the method, ended up with 10 application groups that I was about to try and link to 10 SureBackup jobs. Given the certainty of overloading any ESX host in that cluster by running 10 new VMs at a time I'd have to split this up even further to 30 application groups linked to 30 SureBackup jobs so as to get the load down to 3 additional VMs at a time (just like the default setting in Linked Jobs) - and that's just for a single site! I've got better ways to spend my day and so do other Veeam customers.

Also, and here's the dealbreaker, why SureBackup is completely worthless to us: it breaks the KISS approach, which is that a VM gets created, backed up, and (if Veeam were to add this one single feature) the backup is spun up on an automated schedule and validated. Instead, we have to do a ton of manual work making literally dozens of application groups and dozens of SureBackup jobs, that work eventually falls out of date, has to be audited and redone periodically... and in the meantime there will be "unknown unknown" blind spots in our backup validation process in which we have VMs which may or may not be mission-critical that aren't being validated by our "automated" process.

Come on, Veeam. Please... just add the option. Don't make us wait for Veeam 11 to do it.

Edit: I suppose another solution might be to add the "Process simultaneously up to" field to the Application Group list but that kinda totally breaks the whole reason for the Application Group model in the first place. Nevermind.