We’ve been using Unitrends since August of 2015. When it works, it’s great. When it ISN’T working? Well, it isn’t so great.
I always start any technical service with a web chat. Most vendors that have it stocked with decent techs, Unitrends included. I’ve had issues resolved really quickly using chat. I like chat.
When chat doesn’t get the issue resolved and the case gets escalated? Forget about it. I feel like I have to hound them to get an engineer to look at my case. There is NEVER an engineer available when I call. I can’t say how long I would have to wait if I didn’t “blow up the phone” trying to get some attention, because I always have to resort to being a pain in the a$$ to get my case looked at.
My issue? SQL Differential backups are failing after I upgraded our appliance from 8 to 9. Same thing happened when I did an upgrade from 8.x to a higher 8.x. The first case took a solid week to get resolved. This time, the tech had me try something to see if the nightly SQL Diff backup would work, and then closed the case!! I hadn’t even tried the fix yet!
I love how active Katie Unitrends is on here, but I’d like to see how long it takes the escalation to happen with no intervention. I’ve emailed support, I chatted with a tech to reopen the case. For now, I’ll take a full backup of my SQL stuff and let the DIFF keep failing.
Happy Monday!
8 Spice ups
Brad - First, thanks for using Unitrends & for the great feedback about our chat support. Second, I’m sorry to hear that you’ve had some issues getting the team to call or email you back if you have an issue that our chat support engineers feel needs more attention. I’d like to pass your feedback along to our Customer Support Management team, but per your request to not have this issue escalated without my intervention. If you change your mind, will you let me know?
In terms of your SQL backups failing, I know that the first thing that they’ll ask you to look at is your SQL agent. Was this updated when you updated your appliance OS?
Hi Katie! Yes, the agent was updated.
When I need help I go to the web portal and start a ticket. I generally get a call back within 48 hours. I don’t think I’ve ever had an issue that was urgent enough for me to need anything faster than that.
1 Spice up
Hmmm, and did you check that all of the schedules updated as expected when you did the update? Are you getting any error numbers?
jrondo4
(jrondo4)
6
Sometimes yay, sometimes nay.
The support engineers I connect with are usually pretty sharp, but their responsiveness seems to have dropped off a bit lately. I opened a couple cases earlier this month and it took 3 to 4 days to get a response, and the response was simply to schedule a callback. Neither issue was business critical, so I let it slide (although one case was for a Hyper-V UEB instance that was completely out of commission).
As a customer, it “feels” to me like the support team is overworked and understaffed.
EDIT - to clarify - I opened the cases on Monday morning. I got an email response on both cases that afternoon when I was out of the office. I replied via email to one case shortly thereafter to request a phone call, then I didn’t get a response back until Thursday morning. I was working on a project down in our office near Nashville that week so I had plenty of other work to occupy my time.
jrondo4
(jrondo4)
7
And come to think of it, I also have Unitrends 9 running a SQL differential backup that is failing on a regular basis…
rockn
(Rockn)
8
Never had an issue with Unitrends support for the most part. I am still having the same issue as you are Fletch, I just got tired of having to kick off a full again every time I needed incrementals to run so I just do fulls for everything as out databases are’t that large. If our data grows it will be an issue. Always had problems with SQL backups on Unitrends and it is only on SQL 2008…I believe. Our ERP backups on SQL 2012 are flawless.
Jake - Do you mind sending me the case number of the case you mentioned above? I’d like to address it with our VP of Customer Support.
jrondo4
(jrondo4)
10
Yeah… Unfortunately, that’s the exact same reason I stopped trying to call in for phone support. Maybe I’m just unlucky in calling in during peak busy times. When one has to wait on hold for an extended period of time to reach a support engineer, it does make one less inclined to phone in again after that.
Ian called and we got this taken care of. In the PCPB folder, he had to rename a file .OLD, run a few test jobs, and said everything should be fine. I’ve worked with him before and take his word, he’s a good tech.
Thank you Katie!! You rock! I still love Unitrends, it’s just frustrating to have to poke at something to get it to respond, know what I mean?
2 Spice ups
Brad - I’m glad that Ian was able to connect with you on this. I’m going to share your feedback with his manager so that he gets the kudos he deserves. FWIW, I was letting nature take it’s course on this one. Our support team had about 5 more minutes to try to contact you before I was going to escalate on my end (I was watching the case notes in the background). I am sharing your feedback with our VP of Support so that she can look into this a bit further to see how we can improve our response times to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.
Jake- Thanks for sending those details over. I’m forwarding your feedback onto our VP of Support, and specific case numbers are super helpful.
To anyone else who may be reading this post - If you ever feel like you’ve been waiting too long on a response from us, please send me a note. I’m happy to look into your cases and escalate as requested.
3 Spice ups
I’ve all but given up. version 9 seems to have huge issues with MS VSS on Hyper-V. I have a FreePBX server that has never backed up. Another one where the “solution” is to have only one VM per job. It’s OK while this server is not quite production yet. But when it’s fully operational with 30 VMs, it will be an issue. I could even live with it if their scheduler had the basic functionality to chain jobs. As in job1 starts at 2000, ,job2 starts when job1 is finished, and so on.
jrondo4
(jrondo4)
14
I haven’t encountered that quite yet, but we’ve been backing up our Hyper-V environment with one VM per job since we started on Unitrends. I run Hyper-V Incrementals once per day and stagger the backups so I don’t cripple our Hyper-V environment trying to back up 30+ VMs at once.
Seriously - I have an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all our Unitrends backups…
1 Spice up
Serge - I’m sorry to hear that you’re having these issues. I’d like to have someone look into your implementation to determine what else we can do to get everything sorted out for you. Do you mind forwarding over your contact information so that I can do this for you?
Honestly Katie, I’ve talked to support a lot. The one with multiple jobs, the Unitrend software is running on a R320, amply powerfull. The Hyper-V host is an older IBM server with 10K drives. It’s a temp while I redo the environment, so I’m letting it lie. The one with the failed PBX is an appliance and a brand new T320. Every time I speak with support, they blame VSS. While VSS is not the greatest thing around, if it is known to cause so many issues, maybe there is a better way to deal with it.
As I said, I’m OK with multiple jobs, but the idea of having a job fail because the previous on ran overtime and blocked resources is a bit of an issue. Support’s reason for not implementing chained schedule was because of backups not starting if one of the job goes nuts. I get that, but it’s much more unlikely to happen than a good backup running long because a ton of data was dumped in it.
Serge - We hate to hear that you’re not 100% satisfied with the support that you’ve received, so if you decide that you’d like our Customer Support Management team to look into this further, and see what else we can do for you, please let me know.
I’m still on 8.2 on an older R713 and my Hyper-V backups work like a champ. One backup schedule for all VMs. I think most of the issues surrounding Hyper-V backup has to do with issues with CSV and not so much VSS.
Good practice is to have 1 CSV per host if possible. Underlying storage could be a factor too. I am on an All-Flash appliance so all of the I/O operations and snapshots happen really fast.
The only problem I have had is with the new CBT driver getting corrupted. Uninstalling and reinstalling it always takes care of the issue.
Thanks for the heads up on this. I don’t think I’ll be upgrading until all the bugs are worked out…that sounds like a gong show! I back up a huge amount of VMs, so this would have a huge impact on day to day scheduling. Right now with the latest version of 8, I back up VMs using 4 different tier schedules with multiple VMs being backed up simultaneously on 3 different 2012 R2 FOC’s and it’s pretty flawless. I would NOT want to babysit that process with spreadsheets etc!
Can I get an “Amen” on what’s ahead in 2016 server!
"If you are working in IT you know that Backup is always a issues. And things didn’t really get better by running Virtual Machines running on Storage Systems. With the next release of Hyper-V Server Microsoft will release a completely new architecture to improve reliability, scale and performance of Virtual Machine backups. There are three big changes in the backup architecture:
Decoupling backing up virtual machines from backing up the underlying storage.No longer dependent on hardware snapshots for core backup functionality, but still able to take advantage of hardware capabilities when they are present.Built in change tracking for Backup of Virtual Machines"
