Veeam B&R v9 - using vSphere tags

[rasmusan]

Hi

I have started configuring my backup job sources, based on tags in vSphere as i really think this is cool and simplifies management of backup jobs...

However I seem to have issues using tags to handle application-aware processing. What I want is to have fx a tag that specifies daily backup and a tag that is used when application-aware processing should be disabled. So for instance a VM is tagged with both "daily backup" and "app-aware processing disabled".

In my backup job, I then specifies that source should be tag " daily backup" and under application aware processing I add the tag "app-aware processing disabled" and specified that application proccessing should be disabled.

However it seems that my backup job ignores that, and still tried to perform application aware processing..

Anyone seen this behaviour or know if this is supported/unsupported way of handling application aware processing ?

[veremin]

So, you're after disabling AAIP functionality for VMs with certain tag assigned? What kind of VMs we're talking about? Windows-based, Linux-based, etc.?

[foggy]

Rasmus, currently this behavior is expected, but planned to be addressed in future. As a workaround, to achieve what you're after, you can use tags category for "daily backup" and tag for "app-aware processing disabled", in this case it should work as desired.

[rasmusan]

Thanks for replies - good to know this is expected behaviour, at least for now...

the workaround you have in mind, is that creating 2 separate jobs and then og the job using "app-ware processing disabled" tag, completely disabling AAIP? or do I misunderstand something?

[foggy]

Not actually, what I was talking about was using tags category instead of the tag itself to add VMs into the job.

[JoshuaPostSAMC]

Today we have multiple jobs that select VMs by one tag per job with Guest Processing enabled to do SQL backups and hourly transaction logs. We add specific VMs to the Guest Processing Applications list to override then as some must do SQL Copy Only jobs or cannot have hourly transaction logs backed up.

I created a new category of tags, one for SQL Copy Only, one for SQL Full Backup Only, and then added these tags to the Guest Processing Applications list with my required settings. Because these are more specific than the single job that is select the VMs for the entire job, I assume these would be taken priority just like when I add a specific VM to the list, but it appears that is not the case. VMs that I have set to only do Copy jobs are now trying to process transaction logs because the primary tag for the job is configured to do transaction log backups, and the second tag that is only referenced in the Guest Processing Applications list that said to do Copy Only is not taking precedence.

Any way to make this work, or do I have to continue specifying the VMs inside of each job? My concern is that if a VM gets a changed tag to backup under a different job, the specific SQL settings won't follow them and I'll have to add it manually, where this tag idea, if it worked, would make it simpler.

[JoshuaPostSAMC]

No thoughts?

[DeadEyedJacks]

I believe Veeam can only evaluate a single VMware tag for selection lists.
Other threads within the forum have provided examples of using scripts to combine multiple VMware tags into a single tag for the purposes of Veeam selection lists.
This seems to be the best approach currently.

[foggy]

Currently both tags have similar priority, however, you can use a separate tags category instead one of them as a workaround.

[larry]

Just adding to the tag use. I have two sites, each has a VCA. The tags in site two may be spelled the same but they are not. To exclude VMs I needed to add tags from both VCA to work right between sites

[foggy]

Expected, since tags "live" within the vCenter they are created in. When you're adding tags into exclusions, you're browsing to them under the particular vCenter server.

[tom.starren]

Hello,

Currently I've create a Job which holds are our database servers. This job uses a tag in VMware to select the VMs to backup. In the Guest Processing of this Job I've set the tag which selects all the database servers to VSS Ignore failures and Copy transaction logs only. I've add two additional tags (RPO 1 day and RPO 1 hour) on which VSS is set to require success and SQL is being truncated (for the RPO of 1 hour each hour the databases should be backuped up). What I see now is that the job isn't processing the SQL data. Is this setup even possible?

Kr,
Tom

[foggy]

Hi Tom, this looks like a tags priority issue mentioned above. You'd better use tags category to specify guest processing exclusions. Thanks.

[tom.starren]

Hi Foggy,

Don't understand what you mean. The tag I use for the VM selection in the job is "24H Windows Database Servers" from the catagory "backupJobs". The RPO's I've got are "AppAwareYES - SQL (RPO 1 hour)" and "AppAwareYES - SQL (RPO 1 day)" from the tag category "AppAware". How would you suggest to organize this task?

Kr,
Tom

[foggy]

You need to use tags category itself for VMs selection and tags to specify different guest processing settings for different VMs.

[JoshuaPostSAMC]

@foggy will it work the reverse way, using Tags to select VMs for a job that are all under one tag category with multiple cardinality set to No so a VM is only in one job, and then Guest Processing options setup a separate Tag Categories?

I had gone down this road with a separate tag category for SQL options and setup individual tags under that for guest processing, but didn't work under 9.0 as desired

[foggy]

If you used tags in both places, then there's no guarantee it will work as expected, since tags have similar priorities. You should use category itself to add VMs to the job (tags have higher priority than categories).

[JoshuaPostSAMC]

Is Veeam investigating alternative ways? Tag Categories don't have the option to limit cardinality, so a VM could potentially be a member of multiple backup jobs through Tag Cateogories. So this would be a step backward for us.

Maybe a section of Veeam to give a priority to various tags for it's internal use, so it know that Tag1 from vSphere is higher priority than Tag2 also from vsphere?

[foggy]

The behavior is likely to be changed in the future, depends on the demand.