Implement Backup Regime

[pentana]

I am wondering how other people are going about manging their backups jobs and archiving to tape?
Currently I have 8 backup jobs setup with around 12-14 VM's which is roughly 550GB in size each job.
We don't use any resource pools yet for out Infrastructure so anytime I create a new VM I need to manually select and put them in the job.
I used to run the jobs at the Host level but with DRS the VM's are always moving and the then we can't leverage the CBT etc. of vSphere.
Is there anyway to make 'logical' containers without using Resource Pools in vCenter to do this?

Also with archiving to tape, is there a better way then a Full backup everyday? We need to have daily offsite rotations of tapes and a 1.5TB run everynight is barely making our backup window along with out other physical server backups. We are using Backup Exec to stream to tape...

Any ideas or ways other people are doing this would be great!

[Bunce]

In regard to containers, you can just make folders in VC, and tell the VBR job to backup that folder..

We currently have our VM's organised in folders named Tier1Apps, Tier2Apps, Tier3Apps

The jobs are then related to those folders (eg we might run our Tier1Apps backup daily, and our Tier3 Apps weekly etc).

[Vitaliy S.]

That's correct I would also suggest using containers for your backup jobs.

Additionally, please have a look some real life examples of using tapes, might be interesting:
How to backup Veeam backup files into tape ?

Thanks!

[pentana]

The containers is definitely a good way to go, the only problem is with VSS.
We have seperate departments etc. which we backup for and not all VM's have the same account.
It would be ideal to have a place where we can specify Groups of Servers to use a certain VSS account.
If we add each VM manually into the job I can specify each VM on a 1 by 1 basis, if we use the folders is there anyway of doing this??

[Vitaliy S.]

You cannot specify a separate VSS account to use for an individual VM in the container with v4, as it will be applied to a whole container. I would suggest grouping VMs based on their VSS account and add them to the job as a workaround.

[Gostev]

Also note that version 5 has this additional flexibility around VSS configuration for specific VMs.