Host-based backup of VMware vSphere VMs.
Gostev
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Gostev »

pirx wrote: Jul 09, 2021 12:05 pmI don't see a way how we could utilize this without scripting for our environment.
Absolutely, SureBackup is *totally* designed to be used with scripting to achieve comprehensive recovery verification, as every environment and app are unique - and so are recoverability testing requirements. Some folks are fine just with the VM booting, but most serious customers want to test their entire multi-tier app can be brought back. So there's definitely that complexity, which is why smaller customers usually don't even bother implementing SureBackup (especially since most did not do test recoveries even before Veeam). But bigger customer quickly figure out that it is easier to do some scripting once and get everything automated going forward, than to rarely perform recovery verification of a very small part of an environment manually as they have been doing before.

By the way, how often did you do test restores before Veeam, what percentage of your backups are you restoring during each test, and how long does the whole exercise takes? Most customers tell us they don't even have enough storage to test restores of any meaningful part of their environment, which is one big issue SureBackup addresses.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by pirx »

With scripting I meant to create a custom logic around it and not using the build in GUI. Not test scripts. The question is not how often we tested restores before Veeam, the question is still how often we do this. Because we don't use SureBackup in production. I really like the idea of SureBackup, it's just not that usable at the moment for us. And to be honest, it doesn't look usable for large environments. I really would like to hear some experiences from those user and how they work around the limitations.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Mildur » 1 person likes this post

I am working on a new backup environment for 200-250 vsphere vms. I‘m planning to use SureBackup Jobs.

For a start, I will activate only testing the vm heartbeat for all vms. This is the simplest way for an easy check and to find out, how long it takes to test through all vms.

After that initial configuration, our second step will involve ping and application testing. Because there is a limitation on how many vNICs (vspehre Limitation) can be configured to the virtual Lab appliance, i will need to create virtual labs and surebackups for each customer.
For the backup jobs, we have choosen to use a „backup Job per Customer“ design. That way, i will be able to create surebackup jobs for each customer with dedicated virtual lab appliances for network and script testing.

We have only a small numbers of customers in this environment. But enough to not configured it manually. I have already planned to use scripting to deploy each customers virtual lab and surebackup jobs. To do it manually, it would take too long. It needs some preparation time to get all used subnets for esch customer. But after that, I am sure that a script should work which imports the a prepared csv file with the customers subnets and virtual lab configuration. That is my plan, hopefully it will work. We will see in september or october 😁

For customers onpremise, we have made the decision, that we will sell the customer at least the enterprise edition (VUL with Ent Plus, or Rental Enterprise). Each new backup server will be configured with SureBackup Jobs by us. For OnPremise installations, we configure it manually.
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pirx
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by pirx »

Do the customers have Appliances without VMware Tools installed? From our 1500 VM's there is now a significant number that have no tools and they can't be installed. Would be nice if tests could be enabled or disabled on a per VM base.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Mildur » 1 person likes this post

As far as i know, most of the servers are windows or ubuntu machines. They will have the vmware tools installed. There are a few special appliances like Citrix Netscaler where I think, the tools are not installed.

Disabling the heartbeat test for a specific vm is possible in this step (Advanced Button):
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... b_link.png

But it shouldn‘t be a problem. If vmware tools are not installed, the surebackup job will not test for the heartbeat. From the guide:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... p-settings
Veeam Backup & Replication performs a heartbeat test only if a VM has VMware Tools are installed. If VMware Tools are not installed, the VM will be started but the test will not be performed.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by bg.ranken »

+1 for VM exclusions.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by CTICT »

+1 for VM exclusions. IMO only laziness can explain why a very simple option is not implemented.

But in general Surebackup has a very limited usefulness for a number of other reasons.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by crackocain »

First post date is Wed Mar 02, 2011. (yeah decade)

We missed the 10 year anniversary. If I had remembered last March, I would have written a long article in honor of this subject. I believe that this issue should now be evaluated with an epic understanding. While closing these lines that I couldn't hold back my tears, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this process, especially Surebackup Product Manager.

Still, it would be a big mistake to ignore it. Let everyone say it for the millionth time... +1 for VM Exclusions

Thank you all.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by bg.ranken » 1 person likes this post

My biggest gripe with not having exclusions is it requires us to make changes to our actual backup data within Veeam.

We need to keep some of our servers for up to 6 years, but eventually the servers stop working in SureBackup for whatever reason, normally due to another server taking it's IP (giving false positives for both VMs if they happen to start at the same time), VMware tools being too out of date, or just random other changes that don't vibe with the old VM at the time it was decommissioned. The only way I can stop a permanent job failure is to go into the backup data and remove the old server from inventory, then copy the files for the VM to a new location, and rescan the datastore. But now we need to manually manage retention on that VM.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by ctg49 »

+1, no reason for this job to not have an exclusion button like every other job in VEEAM.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by JaySt »

+1 for exclusions
really suprised to see this thread and see this feature is not there yet. It really makes or breaks surebackup as a usable feature in the deployments i'm encountering at the moment.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by pirx »

We are still in the process of setting up SureBackup. One more reason for VM excludes: the VirtualLab appliance VM itself was not excluded from backup and is failing now in every run. The thing is, even with heartbeat and ping test disabled, the task and job still has status error (Cannot detect VM starting because of timeout - yeah I know, this is the reason I disabled both tests...). Even worse, we had to redeployed VL so we now have a current VL VM that backed up as well as one from a few weeks ago. Both are now tested. But there is no way in the SureBackup job to configure anything for a VM that does not exist in vSphere anmore! I can only choose "Advanced Settings" for VMs from the list pulled from vCenter. At least I don't see any other way.

So an exclude is badly needed. And this exclude must be based on the list of VMs that will be tested, not only based on available VMs in vSphere right now.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Gostev »

Agree with the need.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by mriesenbeck »

DEFINITELY +1. +1000 even.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by mriesenbeck »

Also a retry mechanism, to retry to failed ones with similar settings as in the backup job. Often I see that a SB job fails and when running it a second time immediately or later, it works. So this would be appreciated greatly.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by lrhazi »

+1 (or +1,000,000 if I can) for exclusion list.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Egor Yakovlev »

Noted entire +1M.
We do recognize the need of that feature and are working to make it go live.
No clear ETA yet though.

/Thanks!
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by pirx »

Any hope for V12? I heard that there will probably no changes to Sure Backup. It's now my third attempt to get it into (limited) production use and I always fail - not only because of the missing exclude.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Samba222 » 1 person likes this post

... it's so ridiculous - people have been asking for this feature since 2011 in this thread :arrow: but ok, noted :roll:
wait, I would add another +1 :?
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by pirx »

Next example:

My #1 SB job throws an error for one VM.

Error: REST API error: 'S3 error: The specified version does not exist. Code: NoSuchVersion', error code: 404

Okay, something is broken with the information in DB and our offloads (nothing new, I'm having cases open for this since 2 years now, but that's something different).

How do I get the job to not end every day in error state? I would exclude the VM but that's not possible. Next try, disable ping/heartbeat, also not possible because the VM does not exist anymore in vCenter and in "Linked Jobs -> Advanced -> Verification Rules -> Add" I can only add VMs that still exist in vCenter (!?). At least it does not find this VM, even though the job wants to verify it. Anyhow, as this error occurs during the publishing step it would probably not help to just disable ping/heartbeat.

Even if Veeam doesn't want to work much on the SB feature, the exclude feature is such a low hanging fruit and is requested for such a long time now that I just can't understand that is simply ignored.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Egor Yakovlev »

Hi

Exclusions will not make it in v12, however we are considering to include it with the following update.
Stay tuned.

/Thanks
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by pirx »

Why not simply merge the patch that exists for SureBackip VM exclusion? I just learned that this exists and feel a little bit fooled.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Gostev »

At some point we as PMs are forced to stop asking devs to do "just" this or that (or they will never ship the new version), and this point has long passed for V12 unfortunately.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by pirx »

As it has passed for the last x versions the past 10 years ;|

My point is, I learned just today that there is already a patch for V11 that adds exactly the exclude VM functionality to SB that we are talking about. So I'm a bit disappointed that nobody from Veeam mentioned that we should contact support to get this - or tried to find out that there is already a solution. And if there is already a patch then I don't think that it would have been very hard to include it in V12 - or even long before.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Gostev »

Even I'm not aware there's such a patch... and that would be the first in Veeam's history too, as patches are not supposed to add new functionality. So this needs to be investigated on our end, as this does not sound right in the first place.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by pirx »

I don't see it a new functionality. For all other jobs in Veeam (Backup, Copy, Replication etc) you can exclude whole VMs. Only SB does not allow this (not sure if it is missing elsewhere). So this patch hopefully fixes what was missed 10 years ago. And if it works I'm am happy that it exist and someone finally fixed it and nobody get in trouble. That would be a shame.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by JaySt »

just yesterday had a discussion with a larger customer regarding this. we cant understand the reasoning for not having this for so long and v12 not having it either. This customer is close to labling surebackup useless/not usable without exclusions.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by pirx »

In my opinion, SB as it is, is useless. I know, some people here wrote that they use it in large scale - or planned to use it. But after I put weeks into SB, I just don't see how this can work. It's nice as prove of concept, but in production not usable. I also never met someone that is really using it (VMware usergroup meeting etc). But as always... YMMV!

It's funny that you can only configure options per VM if this VM still exist in vCenter. If the VM was deleted in vCenter you will not find it in "Linked Jobs" -> "Advanced" -> "Verification Settings". So if you have a VM that was backed up and then deleted, it'll have those problems in SB job over and over, you have no chance to solve this until retention time is over (please correct me if I'm missing here something).

Also, you can not change the host of a VL. If this host is in maintenance or replaced, you have to recreate VL. I know that there is a vSwitch etc created on the host for VL. But come on, this is not impossible to do! This was also a topic here in the forum 10 years ago and there could have been a solution meanwhile.

SB is a nice idea that could be very very useful, but with all the issues it's hard for me to see how this will work with a lot of VM's and clusters. Nobody continued development of SB.
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Samba222 »

Oh yes, sign - when you change the host... the recreation of all Virtual Labs is a really nasty job and would be so unnecessary
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Re: Is it possible to exclude VM(s) from SureBackup job?

Post by Mildur »

Hi guys

Have you considered using Multi Host Virtual Labs? The virtual lab is not bound to a single host in that case.
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=110

Thanks
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