Agent and Agentless Backups
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@obsolesce said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
No agentless system comes close to that.
What do you mean? Agentless means the VM can have any OS you can dream up and it'll be backed up at the host level as a whole VM, unlike agent-based backup.
Really? Do AIX or HP-UX then?
@scottalanmiller you have to take the outliers out of the equation. . . as they are so few and far inbetween that you might as just "build your own backup".
Look at the 99% of the world and tell me that agentless isn't "good enough" or the best option in most cases.
Okay. It's not good enough.
It's not the outliers, that's why I explained carefully above. It's nearly all SMBs and enterprises. They almost all have normal, mainstream things that are not supported by agentless making you either need an agent, or need to script. At which point, any overhead of an agent is moot and we are at equal footing from that perspective. Then the flexibility benefit of the agents tends to win out.
Show me a shop that things agentless is good enough, and most of the time I'll show you a shop that didn't consider their backup needs and has a critical workload unprotected. Is agentless at fault, no, but that's how it normally goes. They deployed agentless based on a myth, not on some intrinsic value.
My last job went agentless with XS and XOCE for our AD environment and over 13TB live backup. It was great, nothing to install and it all just worked. Without needing to worry about updating a backup agent on top of the other things that needed to be updated.
Sure, but I've done agent based that is the same. So that's moot. That's just an anecdote that agentless can work. No one doubts that, so pointing it out has no purpose. Agent can work too. And either can not work.
Sounds like you had one bad experience with a bad backup and coincidentally it used agents. You had another good experience, and it coincidentally used agentless. And instead of associating the good setup to teh IT team or the products, you associated it with the approach.
I've not made any point to state that agent or agentless has had good or bad experiences. I'm stating that agentless is often the best solution based on a myriad of consideration points.
Cost, complexity, ease of use to name just a few. You're stating that ease of use should qualify to fire whoever opt'd for the "click and restore" system.
But my original point was that it did not aid in cost or complexity. Because it's not that simply. My number one concern was that people think that it is that simple because it is agentless and that's the biggest risk!
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way. They all have workloads, important ones, that require way more than point and shoot backup strategies. Lots do it anyway, because they don't take the time to research reliable backups.
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@momurda said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 +1, Or making an entire vm with the exact specs of the failed vm, using some iso image the agent made that may or may not work.
So the assumption now is that agentless never fails, but agent based restores do? I don't think that that is a valid approach. If your backup software is bad and unreliable, I doubt it is the agent model that is the issue, as all the same moving parts exist either way.
No the argument is that having to run some special ISO to boot into a recovery environment creates a longer dependency chain, which during a disaster could be a fuck-all to getting things working quickly.
If you are using an agent, the agent should (I know Veeam can) just restore the VM, exact specs and all to the Hypervisor you choose.
So if agents can do it, what's the complaint?
There isn't a complaint, but there also isn't a "everyone should be using agents".
This very much sounds like propoganda as a means of selling your point of view. You're argument to this point has been "everyone should be using agents".
My point is that the topic needs to be considered, based on skill level, hypervisor, and a myriad of other points.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@momurda said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 +1, Or making an entire vm with the exact specs of the failed vm, using some iso image the agent made that may or may not work.
So the assumption now is that agentless never fails, but agent based restores do? I don't think that that is a valid approach. If your backup software is bad and unreliable, I doubt it is the agent model that is the issue, as all the same moving parts exist either way.
No the argument is that having to run some special ISO to boot into a recovery environment creates a longer dependency chain, which during a disaster could be a fuck-all to getting things working quickly.
If you are using an agent, the agent should (I know Veeam can) just restore the VM, exact specs and all to the Hypervisor you choose.
So if agents can do it, what's the complaint?
There isn't a complaint, but there also isn't a "everyone should be using agents".
Makes sense, that would explain why no one said that.
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way.
But that is you, in your limited experience there, with clients that have opt'd for bad options. Either the agentless systems at the time just sucked, or literally did not have these kinds of features.
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
This very much sounds like propoganda as a means of selling your point of view. You're argument to this point has been "everyone should be using agents".
No my point is that agents are the more common best option and that everyone should be evaluating their needs. Go read it again, because you are arguing with someone that is very much not me.
You are confusing the idea that "agentless isn't the only answer" with "agents are the only answer." You are functioning under the logic that whatever the answer is, that there is only one. THAT is the very thing I was saying isn't true.
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@scottalanmiller Im sorry, but what? I have restored about 20 vms here the last 2.5 years for reasons. Every single one was agentless, and took half the time to restore over agent because I didnt have to recreate the vm.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way.
But that is you, in your limited experience there, with clients that have opt'd for bad options. Either the agentless systems at the time just sucked, or literally did not have these kinds of features.
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Well take your environment for example. Guaranteed agentless can't do it all alone without other backup mechanisms doing the heavy lifting. guaranteed.
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@momurda said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller Im sorry, but what? I have restored about 20 vms here the last 2.5 years for reasons. Every single one was agentless, and took half the time to restore over agent because I didnt have to recreate the vm.
How long is it taking you to create a VM? Why is that taking so long? Or are your restores like 2-3 minutes?
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At the last job I was actually tempted to setup not only XOCE but also UrBackup as a means of having constantly created backups from my server because I didn't have a great way of performing Continuous Replication as quickly as I personally wanted.
It was decided above my paygrade that what we got with XOCE (15 minute interval) and was limited only by the network (and hypervisors) that it was good enough.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Right, which is why I didn't.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
At the last job I was actually tempted to setup not only XOCE but also UrBackup as a means of having constantly created backups from my server because I didn't have a great way of performing Continuous Replication as quickly as I personally wanted.
And UrBackup, as an example, was trivially easy to deploy as agents, correct? Did you attempt any restores, was it super easy, too? Why look at it, if agentless has so much more to offer?
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way.
But that is you, in your limited experience there, with clients that have opt'd for bad options. Either the agentless systems at the time just sucked, or literally did not have these kinds of features.
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Well take your environment for example. Guaranteed agentless can't do it all alone without other backup mechanisms doing the heavy lifting. guaranteed.
But agentless did, 100% no issues. So there is a case that agentless worked, without a hitch, met every requirement that the business had, and met the business needs.
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Ridiculous anecdote, but we recently implemented an agent based system in minutes to keep us protected while waiting for support of an agentless system to get it working again. Means nothing, but a useful example that the assumptions that agentless makes it easy and agent makes it hard are just assumptions. In the real world, either can be easy or hard.
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
At the last job I was actually tempted to setup not only XOCE but also UrBackup as a means of having constantly created backups from my server because I didn't have a great way of performing Continuous Replication as quickly as I personally wanted.
And UrBackup, as an example, was trivially easy to deploy as agents, correct? Did you attempt any restores, was it super easy, too? Why look at it, if agentless has so much more to offer?
I looked at it personally (and have already stated this in the previous post) was because the hypervisors we had (and likely network) could only produce Continous Replications every 15 minutes.
This was "good enough" from a business perspective.
Adding UrBackup on top of that, meant I would need double the backup space available, to protect for a possible 15 minute down time. Which the employees and work isn't so valuable that it justified the spend for that much more storage.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way.
But that is you, in your limited experience there, with clients that have opt'd for bad options. Either the agentless systems at the time just sucked, or literally did not have these kinds of features.
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Well take your environment for example. Guaranteed agentless can't do it all alone without other backup mechanisms doing the heavy lifting. guaranteed.
But agentless did, 100% no issues. So there is a case that agentless worked, without a hitch, met every requirement that the business had, and met the business needs.
Are you sure? Or did the workloads just not get evaluated? This is my point, @CCWTech and I just had a meeting with a firm that used agentless and said exactly what you said, but we were able to show them that the one thing that they cared about most wasn't properly protected and that the belief that agentless would "just cover it" had put them in a dangerous position. Unstable databases, the only thing tha tthey were bothering to pay for the backup for in the first place.
My point is, there is no reasonable way that you have all workloads that agentless can handle on its own (or agent based, I'm sure), but if you used agents, likely you'd have considered the workload needs but when doing agentless, it's become the norm to ignore the stability issues.
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Using an agent is like using the HyperV role on top of Windows Server.
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@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
At the last job I was actually tempted to setup not only XOCE but also UrBackup as a means of having constantly created backups from my server because I didn't have a great way of performing Continuous Replication as quickly as I personally wanted.
And UrBackup, as an example, was trivially easy to deploy as agents, correct? Did you attempt any restores, was it super easy, too? Why look at it, if agentless has so much more to offer?
I looked at it personally (and have already stated this in the previous post) was because the hypervisors we had (and likely network) could only produce Continous Replications every 15 minutes.
This was "good enough" from a business perspective.
Adding UrBackup on top of that, meant I would need double the backup space available, to protect for a possible 15 minute down time. Which the employees and work isn't so valuable that it justified the spend for that much more storage.
In that case, why not only use the UrBackup? Seems like the agentless system isn't doing as much as an agent based would do? I feel like you made the case that, in that situation, agents were more robust. And politics, not business need, led to agentless.
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@momurda said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
Using an agent is like using the HyperV role on top of Windows Server.
It's really not. But this is exactly why my article above is important. It's become a solid believe that agents are bad, and agentless is good. It's stopped being an evaluation of needs and protection and just a "this is how it is done because it's the popular new thing." Agents remain very important, and very powerful. Agent based is a useful tool, but more limited and because of market pressures, tends to be very misleading.
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
I don't know a single shop that I've worked with in years now that had an environment where agentless could be used reliably in that way.
But that is you, in your limited experience there, with clients that have opt'd for bad options. Either the agentless systems at the time just sucked, or literally did not have these kinds of features.
You can't go and lump in everything today as "oh it's bad because it's agentless".
Well take your environment for example. Guaranteed agentless can't do it all alone without other backup mechanisms doing the heavy lifting. guaranteed.
But agentless did, 100% no issues. So there is a case that agentless worked, without a hitch, met every requirement that the business had, and met the business needs.
Are you sure? Or did the workloads just not get evaluated? This is my point, @CCWTech and I just had a meeting with a firm that used agentless and said exactly what you said, but we were able to show them that the one thing that they cared about most wasn't properly protected and that the belief that agentless would "just cover it" had put them in a dangerous position. Unstable databases, the only thing tha tthey were bothering to pay for the backup for in the first place.
My point is, there is no reasonable way that you have all workloads that agentless can handle on its own (or agent based, I'm sure), but if you used agents, likely you'd have considered the workload needs but when doing agentless, it's become the norm to ignore the stability issues.
Again, that is a customer who fell into a sales trap and didn't do their own job, or pay for a proper consult. You're lumping shitty customer decisions into a conversation about the merits of two different approaches and stating that anything that uses one approach is "risky" without evaluating the other options.
As much as Olivier is price breaking the XCP-NG world with his pricing models the solution and XOCE work just fine for 99% of the cases that take the time to consider it.
I know for a fact you haven't actually gone and tested XCP-NG or XOCE due to Oliviers business practices, but it is a solid solution as a whole when considered in context of this conversation.
Ignoring who makes it or what it is under the hood.
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@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@scottalanmiller said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
@dustinb3403 said in Agent and Agentless Backups:
At the last job I was actually tempted to setup not only XOCE but also UrBackup as a means of having constantly created backups from my server because I didn't have a great way of performing Continuous Replication as quickly as I personally wanted.
And UrBackup, as an example, was trivially easy to deploy as agents, correct? Did you attempt any restores, was it super easy, too? Why look at it, if agentless has so much more to offer?
I looked at it personally (and have already stated this in the previous post) was because the hypervisors we had (and likely network) could only produce Continous Replications every 15 minutes.
This was "good enough" from a business perspective.
Adding UrBackup on top of that, meant I would need double the backup space available, to protect for a possible 15 minute down time. Which the employees and work isn't so valuable that it justified the spend for that much more storage.
In that case, why not only use the UrBackup? Seems like the agentless system isn't doing as much as an agent based would do? I feel like you made the case that, in that situation, agents were more robust. And politics, not business need, led to agentless.
Because the agent based backup meant that to recover the entire guest, I would have to mount a special ISO, it wasn't nearly as straightforward as "restore this backup from 15 minutes ago to Host 2".
This was the approach of "we want the receptionist to be able to do this should you be on vacation" type of decision. So simple that you could screw up by simply being a moron. Granted only the IT department had the access required to make these kinds of changes, an even there it was with "least-access".
I was evaluating it only to offset the risk of "opps I deleted that file 8 minutes ago, can you restore it" to which the business decided to tell the employee, no you aren't that valuable.
The coverage of that 15 minute window, simply wasn't worth the added cost, not when considering the cost of added storage. It wasn't a question of "Agent does it better" as it didn't do it better in the big case of "we're afraid this VM might die because of sunk-cost decisions years ago".
