Feature Request: Use Tags For Dynamic VM Selection In Failover Plans

[novusbrian]

When creating a Replication Job, you are able to specify a Tag to populate the VM list. This allows us to specify which VM's in vCenter are going to be replicated just by assigning a tag to the VM.

However, when creating a Failover plan the same functionality is not present. On the initial creation of the Failover plan you are able to select VM's based on a Tag, but it just creates a static list of VM's that use that Tag currently. Any new VM's that have the tag added do not get dynamically added to the Failover plan. We have to manually update the failover plan within Veeam for the newly tagged VM's to appear.

It would be nice if the Failover plan had the same functionality as the Replication job, where you can specify a Tag, then when the plan is run, Veeam looks to see which VM's are using that Tag and creates the list of VM's to process at that point.

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

Yes, the request behavior sounds logical, it adds a problem: what if the source VCenter is not available at failover? Replication is built for disasters, so the assumption is, that the source infrastructure is down (including VCenter)

Best regards,
Hannes

[novusbrian]

Hello Hannes,

Thanks for the reply. And yes, that would be a problem, if vCenter was unavailable then Tags would not be able to be read from the VM's in the inventory. But in the event that vCenter is still up, or vCenter is in an HA configuration, then it would still work. A solution for could be to periodically query vCenter inventory and update the list of VM's in the Failover Plan. Say every 10 or 15 minutes. Then when the Failover Plan is run it attempts to query vCenter to get a "current" list of VM's with that tag, if unavailable, it uses the known list from it's last inventory scan.

This is more of a QOL improvement, a "nice to have".

[HannesK]

hmm, maybe as workaround... could a PowerShell script that runs ever 10-15min and creates the failover plan help? Add-VBR-FailoverPlan

[novusbrian]

That might be quire useful. Thanks!