Automatically tag vm's in active surebackup job

[tomas.olsen]

Hello,

is it Possible to get veeam to automatically tag vm's running in a surebackup job?

I want to be able to assign them a vcenter tag, lets say its called "nobackup".
I have a backup job that takes backup of one of my datastores. including all vm's running on it. But when surebackup starts vm's, I want them to be automatically excluded from backup of that datastore. All backup jobs have exclusion set to the "nobackup" tag.
vm's tagged with nobackup is not backed up whats so ever.

Regards,
Tomas

[PTide]

Hi,

Surebackup runs VMs using the dedicated vPower NFS datastore, so there is no way that your backup job will grab SureBackup VMs.

Thanks

[tomas.olsen]

The vPower NFS store is used for read. when you create the virtual lab, a datastore used for redo-logs must be selected.
To make sure all vm's stored at one of my datastores is backup up every day, the datastore has been selected as entity to backup in each job. Veeam then lists out all vm's running on that datastore when backup job is started.
When surebackup uses that same datastore for redologs, Veeam do backup of them vm when the vm just has a secondary disk located on that particular datastore.
A shurebackup vm is running of vPower NFS datastore for read, and has a secondary disk for redo-logs stored at a vmware datastore.
All backup jobs are configured with backup exclusion of vm's tagged with "nobackup" tag in vcenter. So if I decide that I don't want to backup a vm, I just tag it in vCenter and it is dropped automatically from backup.
In my environment lots of vm's are created and deleted. And I must make sure everything is backed up at all times. By using datastores, I have control of how much data is backuped up within each backup job because all datastores have aproximately the same size , and that everything created that day is backed up according to company policy.

regards, Tomas

[PTide]

Right. Does your vLab have a designated resource pool or folder? You could try excluding VMs based on either pool/folder, have you tried that?

Thanks

[tomas.olsen]

Sorry, the virtual lab does not have its own resource group.
Neither is it possible to choose already existing folder or resource group when you create the lab. You can only specify if veeam should automatically create, and if then name the folder or resource group.
No dropdown list of existing folders or resource group is presented.
a folder in vCenter for the lab is automatically created when you create the lab by default.
But the folder name is the same as the virtual lab. Lets say I have five or six labs, then I would have 5 or 6 different folders that all need to be in the exclusion list of each backup job. this is probably not a problem to script this with powershell. But I would have to reconfigure all backup jobs if I create a new lab to ad the newly created virtual lab folder or resource group to the exclusion list of all backup jobs.
That was why I wondered if it was possible to assign already existing vCenter tags automatically to virtual vm's in one or several virtual labs.
Since a tag is just a tag. It does not have anything to do with resource allocation or anything.

Regards, Tomas

[PTide]

But I would have to reconfigure all backup jobs if I create a new lab to ad the newly created virtual lab folder or resource group to the exclusion list of all backup jobs.

Do you create new virtual labs that often? Please describe your use case.

Thanks