Feature Request: Exclusion of mountpoints and/or volume-groups in unmanaged agents on IBM Power

[petesteven]

Hello Veeam R&D Team,

I have several customers with IBM Power environments. A managed agent is not supported in these environments.
This causes issues with file system backups, as we do not want to back up all drives/mount points and need to exclude some parts.

We have set the `ignoreDevices` parameter in the `veeam.ini` file for the disks. This is a huge effort given the large number of devices.
However, the devices change slightly from time to time, so the exceptions in the veeam.ini no longer match.

Therefore, it would be helpful if we could also exclude entire mount points:
ignoreMountPoints = /hana/logs

or even entire volume groups instead of individual devices (currently, and according to our tests and feedback from support, only individual devices are possible):
ignoreDevices = /dev/mapper/hana_vg-hana_data

[rovshan.pashayev]

Hello Peter,

Could you clarify the following:
- Are you running the agents in Standalone mode?
- What backup mode are you using — Entire, Volume, or File-Level?

[petesteven]

Hello Rovshan,

The agents were installed using a preinstalled agent (a protection group was created, and the installation package was then copied to the Power machines and installed).
Unfortunately, there is no other way to do this on IBM Power. Managed is not supported by Veeam.

After that, a backup policy was set up for the servers.
We need to back up the servers using the “Entire” option.
There are many servers, so we specified the entire protection group in the policy, and it didn’t work with the volume level. I think there were issues with naming because the volumes always include the database name, and generic values aren’t allowed. Then, as soon as two servers were added, Veeam stopped working because it couldn’t find a specific volume on each one (i.e., Volume 1 isn’t present on Server 2).
And for an OS restore, we also need “Entire.”

[rovshan.pashayev]

Hi Peter,

So you need to set up a Backup Policy from the VBR side, which will apply to CatchAll Linux agents on IBM Power, where you can specify mount point(s), as a result, the device behind this mount will be excluded.

On top of that, Entire Machine Restore; essentially Bare Metal Recovery for Linux on IBM Power.

Did I understand you correctly?

[petesteven]

Hi Rovshan,

It would, of course, be great if we could exclude this directly from the backup policy. Unfortunately, that’s not possible right now.

Currently, we’re using the veeam.ini file for this—that would be the alternative or workaround—but we can’t exclude mount points there, only individual disks.

BMR is requiered.