What is Veeam SureBackup?

An honest answer, it is probably the most under-utilised feature of the Veeam Backup and Replication suite. Whenever I’m deploying a new Veeam solution I always push for the time to setup and configure SureBackup, inevitably I always get a question back from the customer: What is SureBackup and what benefit does it bring?

I thought that answering that question at the very least will give you a link to send to customers rather than writing it out yourselves!

SureBackup is an umbrella term used for the components that make up Veeam’s automated restore testing and validation technology. There are 3 main components: Virtual Lab, Application Groups and SureBackup Jobs. Each of these works together to successfully define what workloads you’re testing and how you’re testing them.

First of all, we have the Virtual Lab or vLab, this is the core component of any SureBackup environment. It handles the isolated network routing for the workloads within the vLab. All other components are reliant on this. During deployment, by default it will also deploy a new vSwitch onto the chosen host within your infrastructure alongside the appliance.

Next, we have Application Groups, these are vital if you’re wanting to test applications which rely on DNS resolution and/or logging in with domain credentials. Application groups, as the name implies, allows you to group a selection of VMs together which perform a role in your infrastructure like Domain Controllers or DNS servers. You can then specify that this application group is always brought up before the VMs you actually want to test.

Which leads us onto the SureBackup jobs themselves, this puts everything together and whacks a schedule on it! Here you define the vLab you want to use, any dependant Application Groups, the actual workloads you’re wanting to test and the test criteria themselves.

Within the SureBackup job, you define what you want testing and how. By default, it will test every VM by leveraging the Veeam Instant Restore feature (insert future article here) but attaches its vNIC to the isolated vSwitch deployed as part of the vLab. Once imported it will start the VM and wait for VM heartbeat and a successful ping on the vNIC adapter.

After both of those tests are performed the VM is cleaned up from the virtual estate and VM files are scanned for corruption and/or bit rot. This check is vital for your archival backups as these files can be sitting on the physical media for a long time and particularly susceptible to corruption and bit rot which is where the individual bits (0 and 1s) stored on the drives are altered from their intended state.

If all goes well you should have a VM with a big tick next to its name, which if you’re running VeeamOne within your environment you can then report on. Great for audit and management reporting purposes!