"Test every VM every time."

It doesn’t take long to realize it’s one thing to schedule automatic backups, but quite another to verify those backups actually work when you need them. All sorts of things could go wrong, from simple things like running out of backup storage space, to more tricky problems such as data corruption. When it comes to making backups of virtual machines (VMs) running in VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V environments, the list of possible problems gets bigger and the problems harder to spot.

Which is why people working in VMware environments could be particularly interested to hear about virtual server backup specialist Veeam’s new SureBackup technology.

In an interview with The Hypervisor, Veeam’s Director of Global Systems Engineering, Doug Hazelman, said, “Pretty much every VMware backup product uses snapshots to make backups. The only problem is you end up with a crash consistent backup. There’s no guarantee that the OS will start properly or the apps won’t have corruption.”

Veeam SureBackup gives IT managers the ability to automatically verify those image level backups for every VM. It works by powering on the backup VM, checking that it works, powering it off and reporting on it. IT managers define a verify step in each backup job, including defining dependencies such as other VMs and network topologies needed for the application to pass the verification.

“We’ll have a new wizard that you walk through to create the new environment and new dependencies. And you can schedule that whole job too, so you can have automated backup and verification,” added Hazelman.

“We also let you create customised verification scripts. For example, you might want to query the status of your store service in a Microsoft Exchange environment. We’ll support multiple different scripting interfaces because of the multiple operating systems we see in virtualised environments. For Linux it might be one scripting language, for Windows it might be PowerShell, it doesn’t matter to us. The big point is that it will work with anything that runs on VMware – it can test every VM every time,” said Hazelman.

SureBackup is due for launch later this summer, and will work with existing backups created with Veeam Backup & Replication 4.x.