SureBackup Feature Request

[owenw]

Hi,

We are currently running several SureBackup jobs to validate different areas of our backups. One of the issues I have hit on several occasions is Veeam only allows 1x SureBackup to be running at a time.
I have 2x requests here:

1. I want to be able to use SureBackup to bring up some core infrastructure, such as a D, DHCP Server, File Server (File share witness for Exchange for example) and have this stay up for a period so that this can be used by dependant children SureBackup jobs.

2. I then want to be able to run secondary sure-backup jobs within the same Virtual Lab (one at a time due to resource limitations), which depends on the above DC etc, which I can use to validate Exchange, file servers, DB servers etc, without having to include the DC in each backup job. Having the DC etc in each SureBackup needlessly extends the time to complete these tests.

I know I can create multiple labs, however these are isolated from each other, and are additional overheads which should not be necessary, as well as creating the need to have multiple SureBackup DCs in each lab, which is what Im trying to avoid.

[Zew]

Why not run them under one SureBackup job? That is teh point to startup all required VMs to test for services, within one Surebackup job?

[DaveWatkins]

I'd like this too.

To answer the above question, why both running all the tests on the core infrastructure for every job?

In my case I'd like to be able to have it multiple jobs deep. For example have a job with core stuff (DC's, DNS etc), then have a second job with backend support servers like SQL clusters, then a third job to bring up the application servers.

At that point there would be multiple application jobs using the same SQL servers but only tearing down the application jobs between each run, then once the whole thing has run the SQL and DC jobs get torn down. And yes I could run the SQL servers in the first job but that assumes only a single SQL server or cluster. I actually have multiple that I could run up all at once but each one supports enough applications and web systems that running the whole thing up for every application would take forever, and unless I could dedicate a very large host just to this there is no way I could do it otherwise.

[owenw]

Hi,

As Dave states, having a large surebackup job containing many "big" VMs such as exchange cluster, SQL DBs is slow to bring up and test, as well as heavy on resource on the cluster.
Im lucky enought to have cluster/SAN to support this capacity, but I dont want to be waiting for half day + to bring all this up when the option to "nest" these jobs would allow me to run a DC and DHCP up about once a week almost as a refresh/update into the Surebackup bubble, and leave them up.
This ensures that Im no more than a week out of sync with AD when new objects are created or updated in production.
I would want to leave these in place (along with other core file servers and exchange for a day or 2 at a time) while completing additional testing on the machines, which may or may not then require more servers restoring into the SureBackup bubble on an ad-hoc basis.

Having this as a nested option would reduce our overheads as a team manually restoring from backup into the surebackup datastore with network changes (for isolation).
This has potentially huge wins on a number of levels primarily including backup testing but also for upgrade testing etc.
Surebackup is a great piece of functionality, which I can see becoming even more useful if the option to have surebackup jobs dependant on other surebackups, additionally with the option to leave the parent job running indefinitely after the job exits.

[owenw]

Any response from Veeam on this?

Can this be added as a feature request please?

[Zew]

I asked about this long ago, never seemed to fly.

I managed to build my own test environment, built off restoring from my backups. Pretty much like sure backup but direct rebuilt VM's so you can snap em, and do all the other VM fun stuff you normally would do with an VM. I mean you can usually do that with the sureback job too, but I found even with a solid vPowerNFS store, the "re-hydration" time it took between VIBs for each added dependent server just made the whole concept implausible for me. Having a dedicated Test enviro I can change at a whim using any backup is wayyyy better. The only issue is the time it takes to do a complete VM disk recovery, also unless you configure some kind of replication, the data can sometimes get stale, but in my place for testing and dev, the stale data isn't a huge concern.

Best of luck!