Question

Pause Backup/Replication Job


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Hi guys,

We have to take backup from large number of virtual machines in our environments and sometimes backup jobs are still running during working hours. It has impact on virtual machines performance. Is there any way to define backup window for jobs and backup/replication jobs pause temporarily?

 

Thanks


12 comments

Userlevel 7
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Hello @Davoud Teimouri ,

you can define a backup window in the job.

 

 

Userlevel 7
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Hi @Davoud Teimouri, to answer your question specifically, this is not possible. Please take a look at this link for similar concern: https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-replication-f2/can-i-pause-a-veeam-backup-and-resume-it-later-t72122.html

Userlevel 7
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@Davoud Teimouri , as noted by @Iams3le there is no way to schedule a ‘pause’. The only thing you can do, as @JMeixner mentions, is to create a schedule ‘window’ defining the hours which the backups can run.

Userlevel 7
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HI @Davoud Teimouri 

If you have the possibility you can implement a hardware snapshot storage to limit the impact on production VMs and the backup time of a classic backup job based on individual VM snapshots.

Storage snapshot if I remember correctly you can run backup as source and mixed jobs.
Maybe that way you can have VM backups and replicas without overlap.

https://bp.veeam.com/vbr/Support/S_Vmware/storage_integration.html

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/backup_from_storage_snapshots_hiw_hp.html?ver=120

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/backup_from_storage_snapshots.html?ver=120

https://www.veeam.com/videos/configure-backup-storage-snapshots-15506.html?rwty

https://www.veeam.com/blog/how-snapshots-backups-work-together.html

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

@Link State provides a good workaround, the other thing to point out is that “pausing” a backup job could consist of two meanings:

  1. Stop processing new VMs but finish existing ones
  2. Stop processing current VMs until I resume.

Scenario 1 could be useful at times, but Scenario 2 won’t provide all the benefits you expect as your VM snapshots will remain for the duration of the backup job (unless offloaded to storage as mentioned by Link State).

 

The other thing I’d ask is, is it due to your snapshots that you’re having performance problems, or due to the speed at which Veeam is reading from your source datastores? If it’s this you could use leverage storage IO control https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/io_settings.html

Userlevel 4
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@Link Stateprovides a good workaround, the other thing to point out is that “pausing” a backup job could consist of two meanings:

  1. Stop processing new VMs but finish existing ones
  2. Stop processing current VMs until I resume.

Scenario 1 could be useful at times, but Scenario 2 won’t provide all the benefits you expect as your VM snapshots will remain for the duration of the backup job (unless offloaded to storage as mentioned by Link State).

 

The other thing I’d ask is, is it due to your snapshots that you’re having performance problems, or due to the speed at which Veeam is reading from your source datastores? If it’s this you could use leverage storage IO control https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/io_settings.html

I want to solution like 1st scenario, stop processing VMs and finish ...

All best practices are implemented to reduce impact but during working hour, read I/O has impact on users experience. 

Userlevel 4
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Hi @Davoud Teimouri, to answer your question specifically, this is not possible. Please take a look at this link for similar concern: https://forums.veeam.com/veeam-backup-replication-f2/can-i-pause-a-veeam-backup-and-resume-it-later-t72122.html

Thank you. I’ve read that.

Userlevel 4
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Hello @Davoud Teimouri ,

you can define a backup window in the job.

 

 

Thank you @JMeixner but it doesn’t allow job to start.

Userlevel 4
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Thank you all. Seems there is no feature and option. I hope that we have this option as a feature if other users want it too.

Userlevel 7
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Thank you all. Seems there is no feature and option. I hope that we have this option as a feature if other users want it too.

You should put a suggestion in the forums - https://forums.veeam.com

 

Userlevel 7
Badge +9

Thank you all. Seems there is no feature and option. I hope that we have this option as a feature if other users want it too.

You are welcome! Kindly mark any of the response closest to your concern as the correct answer. 

Userlevel 7
Badge +20

I’d say either look at Backup IO control to see if that helps enough, otherwise you could use some scripting to create a more advanced policy for you, using Stop-VBRJob to stop your backup job, you could even use the -Gracefully parameter to define if it should gracefully stop processing or stop immediately depending on your preference

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