Exclude VMs from backup based on wildcard

[jakesterpdx]

Hi All,

I have a backup job that exists as a catch-all to backup all VMs, even those that I don't know about yet, so I have configured Veeam to backup everything on my hosts, which is great. The problem is that there are a group of VMs that I really don't want/need to backup. They are systems that QA spins up for testing. I can manually exclude them, but this is tedious, because there are many of them. Is there some way to tell Veeam, "If a VM starts with 'QA-' don't back it up"?

Thanks,

-Jake

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Jake,

No, this is not possible, but how about grouping QA VMs in a certain folder? In this case you would easily be able to skip this folder in the job configuration wizard and backup/replicate VMs you actually need.

Thanks.

[jakesterpdx]

Hi Jake,

No, this is not possible, but how about grouping QA VMs in a certain folder? In this case you would easily be able to skip this folder in the job configuration wizard and backup/replicate VMs you actually need.

Thanks.

Ah! That's a great idea - thank you!

[foggy]

You can also use the search box at the bottom of the 'Add Objects' window when specifying job exclusions, type something like "QA" and get all these VMs in the list. Then just click Ctrl+A to select them all and add them to the job exclusions.

[jakesterpdx]

Yeah, the problem with that is that they may name them something different from time to time, so the folder approach should work really well for us.

[dellock6]

Hi all,
I'm not sure how many of you have this problems, becasue is related to having a large environment with a high rate of VM deploys and deletions.
Anyway, we have some VMs that needs to be excluded from backups for several reasons, and the usual way of doing it is to load them one by one in the job esxclusions. I know exclusions can be made by containers rather than single VMs, and this is how we are now dealing with it.
Anyway, it would be a nice to have features if we would be able to have wildcard options for excluding VMs. I know this would be made by VM name rather than it's moref ID, so I'm not sure how it would guarantee consistency...

I see some benefits in this feature for virtual appliances automaticall deployed by different software, to name a few TrendMicro Deep Security and Zerto both deploy VM on every host with random names (also vShield Edge, but in this case they are all registered inside a dedicated Resource Pool, so it's easy to exclude them...).

Is it a feature someone else may need, or I'm the only one?

Luca.

[Gostev]

This feature is in the middle of my "short-list-of-smaller-features-for-when-you-have-nothing-to-do" that I am maintaining for developers they occasionally pick and chose features from this list depending on the skill set of the specific developer who becomes available.

[dellock6]

Ahahahahahahha!
"everything is in a roadmap"

Luca.

[Gostev]

Ask, and we shall deliver