v5 SureBackup & Sandbox With Replication Jobs

[mplep]

Hi,

The SureBackup and Sandbox features with v5 look great but are they only for Backups jobs and not Replication? Apologies if I missed this in the FAQ's.

Thanks in advance,

Mark

[Alexey D.]

Hello Mark,

Currently we support this only for backups. Thanks!

[Gostev]

Well, replicas do not even have the main issue that vPower addresses. Replicas are already created in native, ready to run format. There is nothing preventing you from creating snapshot on your replica, changing the network and start it up for recovery verification or sandbox (see here for procedure) - our customers have been doing this all the time. Actually, watching them doing this is what made us thinking about providing similar capabilities for backup files, which previously could not be "started" without many hours of running restores.

[mplep]

Hi,

I have tested firing up a replica with the procedures you mentioned. It's just that SureBackup verifying the replicas (pinging, emailing, etc.) automatically sounded cool. So if I want that we have to move to Backups it seems.

I'm just trying to balance out the pros and cons of Backup versus Replicas and which suits us best.

Thanks

Mark

[Gostev]

Replicas provide 2 big benefits comparing to vPower-enabled backups:
1. They run without any dependencies on Veeam Backup. Even with our server fried, you can simply power them on with vSphere Client.
2. They run at full I/O capacity immediately. This is critical for heavy I/O servers, or in case of massive disasters (whole site going down).

Just about everything else about replicas makes them worse than vPower-enabled backups (storage space required, limited target options, etc). However, the 2 reasons above are huge drivers to using replication for select VMs.

[mplep]

Hi,

Will you be adding the SureBackup verification feartures to replication jobs? It's look like replication is our best option, but we really loved the SureBackup feature which overcame a significant manual process for us.

Thanks

Mark

[Gostev]

Hello, we will consider and prioritize this feature based on the feedback, just like we do it with all other features. With the whole SureBackup framework already present (virtual lab, proxy appliance, jobs, reporting etc.) this should not be hard to add if there is real need. Can you tell me what would you use this feature for primarily, if we had it?

On a side note, we are planning to add some significant enhancements to our replication engine in the near-term, so any additional functionality will be build on top of updated replication engine only. It simply does not make sense for us to invest in adding any features to the current replication engine right now, as it will be deprecated soon. As you probably noticed, there are very few replication-related new features in v5 (for exact same reason). So, expect the feature you are requesting to be delivered either with, or after above-mentioned replication engine updates.

Thanks!

[mplep]

Hi Gostev,

I (and the management) love the idea of SureBackup and were slightly dissapointed when we releasied it wasn't available with replication. We are a newly signed up Veeam Service Provider and are preparing our package and services right now. Something like SureBackup would provide a fantastic assurance to clients that their hosted VM's are good to go whenever they need them. Currently we'd have to perform this manually which would be quite a task, especially with the potential volume of VM's.

I know you probably can't say much about future enhancements, but can you elaborate on these (or a rough time frame) if they are based upon current client feedback? It would be useful for advanced technical and service planning.

Thanks

Mark

[Gostev]

Hi Mark, yes I can definitely see how "SureReplica" is important for you to have as a service provider... this makes perfect sense. Do I understand correctly that your business is about providing your customers with offsite storage and DR datacenter to backup and replicate their VMs to (respectively)? Do your clients mostly backup, or replicate, or both? We can discuss this offline if you prefer. This is very important for me, as I've been looking for some service providers among our customers to talk to in light of some upcoming features, to have our thinking validated. And we will also need closed beta testers, preferably those who actually care about these features and get it

Yes, most of our features are always based on feedback from our clients, but as always with Veeam there are innovations, too. And actually I can see already how these features will be pretty game changing for service providers. As for timelines, there are multiple new features coming and they are touching many aspects, and while some features may be delivered sooner in point releases, I expect it will take about a year to implement and release everything we have in mind for the next major release.

[YoMarK]

Hi Gostev,

I (and the management) love the idea of SureBackup and were slightly dissapointed when we releasied it wasn't available with replication.

Me too

[jeromep]

[merged]

Hello,

I searched the forum and have seen that this feature was missing in 2010, see post v5 SureBackup & Sandbox With Replication Jobs.
I do replication of 2 VMs to another ESXi server and would like to use SureBackup, it seems to be searching for a backup, is it still possible to have Veeam automate the machine test even if it is replication?

[Gostev]

Hello, kindly please do not create new topic if an existing one available. Answer to your question can be found in the very first response to this topic. Thanks.

[jeromep]

I did a search, found the topic and looked at the date which was Oct 20, 2010 and I didn't want to wake a dead thread, anyway the last reply wasn't answered.
Maybe the status of SureBackup replications changed since then.

[larry]

[merged]

First I love the sure backup feature. We are getting rid of full weekly backups for most VM’s now the we can 100 percent trust a backup is good. Is there any plans for a Sure Replica ? We were using more and more replica's but now with Sure Backup we are moving back to more backups, I would perfer to still use replica's but SureBackups are too important.

[kjc3303]

Coming from the 'testing replicas' thread I have a feature request.

Similar to the surebackup facility would it be possible to have a surereplica facility for automated DR testing. This would be brilliant for automated testing of you replicas and would enable a more frequent DR testing procedure.

I would probably not do away with manual testing but having a surereplica DR Test monthly and bi-annual manual test would give me great confidence.

As Trey said having the reporting facility on DR test would be nice too!

kjc, I was just about to ask if this would be in a future release. Why wouldn't it be? It's already built. I would love this and maybe in Enterprise Manager run some reports on the DR Testing. Sure Backup Replica testing would be very awesome.

Cheers Kev

[cliffm]

A surereplica feature would answer my prayers. I bought Veeam B&R solely because of surebackup. But backup sets are not natively stored on a datastore as a bootable VM, replicas are. Replicas written to a DR server boot instantly and run at full speed on that server, backups have to go through the "restore entire VM" process.

I need to keep incremental backups of a LOT of files on some VMs for up to a year. I don't use Veeam for this because the data storage is out of control. I use Veeam purely for bootable copies of production VMs and keep 21 restore points. Replicas make more sense to me because recovery from a production server failure is just that much faster. So yes this would be a great feature! Is there a plan to release this? Thanks

[Vitaliy S.]

We will consider and prioritize this feature based on the feedback. Thanks!