Here we are with the first post of a new series: Veeam Quick Tips! As you probably know, this kind of posts will be short and simple, yet hopefully useful in the everyday life as a user/administrator of Veeam’s solutions.
I’m going to kick off this series with something I noticed many users don’t know – or maybe they just don’t think about it before they know it’s there: multi-selection!
The first use that comes to mind for this feature is managing / editing large amounts of objects in batch. Sure, the most complete way to do this would be via scripting – for example, you can use Veeam Backup & Replication’s Powershell snap-in to manipulate almost all objects and settings of the software – but most tasks can also be accomplished using the GUI (Veeam B&R’s console).
Side note: kudos to Veeam’s UX developers for managing to keep the interface simple for a product that grew enormously under the hood in terms of functionality over the last few years. VB&R 9.5 Update 3 (released last December) for example added centralized Agent management, new storage integrations and a ton of other new features!
Here is a list with some of the things you can do using multi-selection in Veeam B&R’s user interface (click on an item to see a screenshot):
- Add multiple VMs to a backup or replication job
- Disable or delete jobs in batch
- Remove backups in batch
- Upgrade out-of-date Veeam components after applying a software update
But something I found really useful is the ability to specify different Guest Processing settings for multiple VMs at once, built right into the UI!
This means you can, for example, configure SQL / Oracle settings, File exclusions and/or scripts for any number of VMs in one go, instead of modifying settings individually:
This also means you can set a specific credential for interacting with multiple VMs in a couple of clicks – especially handy if you are mixing VMs with different OS in the same job:
Starting with Veeam B&R 9.5 Update 3, you can also install and manage Veeam Agents (for both Windows and Linux) centrally from B&R’s console.
Multi-select works there too – so you can easily do mass actions on Agents in a couple of clicks!
That’s all, folks! Hope this little post is useful.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!