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

[JPMS]

+1 from me too.

When we remove VMs from a backup, Surebackup keeps testing them while a historical backup of the VM remains in the repo, in our case, for a year.

Lots of Surebackup testing of VMs that we don't want tested!

[Egor Yakovlev]

Thanks for all the feedback. Every vote counts.
/Cheers!

[NightBird]

+1 for VM exclusions

[mikeely]

+1 (gazillion) for VM exclusions

[Mildur]

+1 for VM exclusions

[FrancWest]

+1 for VM exclusions.

[Dima P.]

Hello folks,

Thanks for sharing your feedback. We will discuss this improvement with RnD folks (it's already marked as a very demanded improvement request). Cheers!

[gosnells]

+1 for VM exclusions.

[crackocain]

I'm try right now enable SureBackup in my client and i'm sick of try enable and tell customer over and over again.

Customers use PerVM, They bought Enterprise or Enterprise Plus for this. Infact there are only customers who have purchased Enterprise for this feature. Because job automation is critical after 50 VM's. One single daily backup job, added cluster. Right now i'm think "how am i test critical 100 of 150 virtual machines in SATA disks.
So here my options.
1- Create 100 application group and create 100 surebackup jobs. This way SATA disk speed is enough. VM's open one by one.
2- Delete single backup job and create 150 backup jobs. After that add 100 backup job to one surebackup job. (mismatch to Enterprise or Enterprise Plus feature, I guess I can't be the only one to see the illogicality here.)
3- Create 10 application group and create 10 surebackup job for load balancing. 10 VM maybe open in same time in SATA disks. Not open? Try for 5 VM, not open? 3 VM etc etc.

So customers don't want (not we, especially customers want this) hundreds of surebackup jobs or application group. Because we enable this feature at first but customers not want to unnecessary leg work. It is not designed to be user friendly. We convince the customer about Surebackup is critical for the customer but in PoC customer see job management in Surebackup they don't use it or buy Standart license. Both situation is Veeam loss, not customer. (because they don't like it)

I'm really hard to understand why we wait 8 year about this feature? Actually I complaint below topic. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one complaint about this problem, open case and Veeam solved 5 months. Yeah write latency is much critical compare this topic. But in this topic everyone begging about this feature.

vmware-vsphere-f24/ibm-storage-snapshot ... ml#p379764

[Alec King]

Hello,
As I mentioned earlier in this thread - Veeam Availability Orchestrator is the tool to solve this. With VAO you can create VM groups from any criteria you want - VAO plans are not based on VBR jobs, you can use vSphere tags, VM names, datastore, etc.
And in VAO you can test your plan VMs with much more flexibility than SureBackup jobs. There are many features for VAO DataLabs that are not even in VBR (such as re-IP during plan test)
With the new "DR-Pack" licensing for VAO you can get VAO licenses for all VMs at approx 80% discount. I really suggest those who are using a lot of SureBackup/SureReplica should check out VAO!

[Samba222]

+1 for VM exclusions

[Hevros]

+1 for VM exclusions

[mikeely]

you can get VAO licenses for all VMs at approx 80% discount. I really suggest those who are using a lot of SureBackup/SureReplica should check out VAO!

This seems like a very uncomfortable place to make a sales pitch.

+1 for VM Exclusions.

[Alec King]

Hi Mike, Sorry if you are uncomfortable, however I am pointing out the solution in Veeam's portfolio that fulfils exactly the functionality everyone is asking for. I think it would be remiss of me not to point that out.

[ChrisB1]

+1 for VM exclusions

[Stabz]

+1 for VM exclusions

[Seve CH]

After several years using Veeam B&R, I've decided to try Surebackup. On paper it sounds cool, but the implementation... ouch.

This is my user experience:
- Mapping credentials to VMs is, err... difficult if not impossible.
- Extreme slow. Application VMs (AD and a pair of common file servers and other "basic"/required infrastructure VMs) take up to 1 hour to run because they run sequentially.
- Veeam starts starting/stopping VMs from jobs without any control (order, what to test or to exclude)
- Veeam starts to boot and verify no-longer existing VMs which still exist on old backups.
- No multi-subnet support per VLAN. I know it is crap, but some clients still use that on legacy networks.
- No support for existing virtual switches without some kung-fu. There is distributed switch or isolated network (standard switch, Veeam managed, single host).

I could find solutions if I invest more time doing some research, but why make it difficult for your users?

My feature request will suit for these asking for "VM exclusions", will solve the problem of zombies coming from their graves (archived backups) and will let switch from jobs-based tests to policy-based tests:

Use VM-Tags to link VMs to Surebackup jobs.

"Label X" -> "This VM requires a Surebackup test from job surebackup X" -> 1x Monthly, heartbeat only, vLab 1
"Label Y" -> "This VM requires a Surebackup test from job surebackup Y" -> 1x Weekly, full tests with credentials from domain Y, vLab 2
No label -> No Surebackup

I would suggest a 2. step approach:
- First step should be "easy" to implement and will make many people happy: Like now, but adding the possibility to link VM-Labels instead of jobs.
This solves the problem for the users wanting to exclude VMs: Just don't stick them a label!
This enable policy-based tests.
Makes Veeam "logical": It is not logical to let use labels everywhere but not on Surebackup jobs
So, IMHO, this is a must-have functionality in order to use Surebackup.

- Second step, which adds more value to the product, is to be able to define parameters per VM-label: Stay powered on, what to test, credentials, test priority (Label A will be tested before label B...), parallelism (how many concurrent VMs to test).

So, my +1 to be able to manage exclusions/inclusions

Regards

[Alec King]

Hi,
For all of your requested features, you need Veeam Availability Orchestrator.

[crackocain]

For my perspective, 7 years Veeam Partner

Customers want to good and useful product for backup testing. They don't want completely new and detailed Disaster Automation solution. Some customers they don't replicate VM's via Veeam. They use storage replication.

We have exclusion ability for backup, replication, storage snapshot, backup copy, vm copy. Only tape and surebackup has no exclusion ability.

For example my customer bought 24 CPU VAS, and has 1000 VM (300 critical)

If this customer want to surebackup exclusion they have to paid same amount of dollar.
24 CPU 3 year perpetual license price = 300 VAO 3 year subscription license price.

Please check the list prices.

Believe or not, customers they not buy VAO for this subject. We embarrassed the customers because of the difficulty of use. Believe me, adding this feature to VAO will not increase the number of customers.

Because of this I will not recommend VAO to any of my clients. If SureBackup exclusion add to VBR then VAO is useful product and we will be sell.

[Seve CH]

Hi,
For all of your requested features, you need Veeam Availability Orchestrator.

Thanks for your answer. So Surebackup is of limited use then. Pity.
We aren't implementing it.

[Samba222]

Hi,
For all of your requested features, you need Veeam Availability Orchestrator.

... not a qualified answer I would have expected in this forum

[mikeely]

Really, adding exclusions should not be a technically challenging feature, trying to upsell to another product for this one small feature isn't great.

[lukklin]

+1 for VM exclusions

[tgregorius]

+1

[msobm]

+1 for VM exclusions

[mweiss]

+1 for VM exclusions, or just let us pick individual VMs instead of a whole job.

Application group fails the whole thing and stops after one VM fail even if other VMs are still in the list. And I don't want to test EVERY VM in my backup job so I'm stuck using only application groups.

There must be a better way....

[roachg]

+1 for VM exclusions

[pirx]

I just started to look into SureBackup and without Exclusions it's just not worth looking into it any further. The whole feature looks like it was implemented in a haste and not further developed. I can't clone a job (like backup or copy jobs), I can't exclude VM's. This looks not like a lot of effort to implement and people are asking this for years. To be honest, I don't know anyone that is using SureBackup, and I slowly understand why.

[Gostev]

In fact, I've just looked it up about a months ago. According to our support big data, close to 50K of our customers use SureBackup. Mostly larger ones, because many are required to do periodic recoverability testing by policies and regulations in any case. And SureBackup makes it 100x faster and 100x cheaper than manual recovery testing (just from personnel costs perspective of doing the same manually).

Now, I agree the ability to exclude VMs from SureBackup jobs would be useful, and I secretly wish SureBackup PM was more actively pushing devs to finally find some resources to implement this feature but for example, the ability to clone SureBackup jobs simply never came up in over 10 years.

[pirx]

How do you count usage of features? Will my test job be counted too? It's just that this feature sounds very useful and is pushed a lot when talking about storage corruption etc. But when you start looking into it, it just feels not very mature and usable in a (larger) environment. More like implemented to have it on the feature list. At least this is just my impression, and I don't see a way how we could utilize this without scripting for our environment.