VBR V7 - Suggestion

[flavor4real]

Here is something that might be interesting for Veeam. Under Veeam 6.5, the
Virtual Machine selection on the left shows all the VM's of the current
infrastructure. It shows a variety of columns on the top that reflect
information of the listed VM's Name/ Size/ Folder and so on. It would be
good to have a column that would show if a VM is listed in one of the Backup
Jobs. Example: Backup Status. The data could be pulled over the VM notes
option under a jobs advanced setting. The Veeam backup admin could then
visually see if a new VM has been added to the infrastructure and then
right-click it and add it to a job. The " right-click it and add it to a
job" function is already available under 6.5

I run in this issue several times where new VM's are getting created by the
VM Admin and I'm not being notified about it. The VM therefore is not added
to any backup jobs until something happen or I find it somehow. I usually
export a list from vSphere and see which VM has nothing listed under the
NOTES section. The notes section/ feedback comes from the Veeam Job I've
setup.

Just an idea

[chrisdearden]

You could achieve this today - potentially change your jobs to use a VI container , ( folder/resource pool/datastore etc ) - that way unless you exclude a VM explicitly, it'll get backed up.
You could also leverage the VM protection reports that are part of the full Backup Management Suite - these allow you to specify a given RPO ( say 48 Hours ) - and will highlight all virtual machines without a successful backup in that timeframe.

[flavor4real]

Thought about it but adopting it on our current infrastructure would mean that a large variety of VM's that are not supposed to be backed up are actually then getting backed up. I was instructed not to do it that way ....

[chrisdearden]

You can always apply exclusions for those particular VM's - still I'm sure your colleagues would have their reasons !

[brupnick]

Are there any plans to have VBR support VMware tags? This would alleviate this issue as organizations could apply a tag to a VM and not impact their current use of resource groups or folders.

[tsightler]

Tags are not exposed via any available API, so that's a problem. If VMware changes this then it's always possible.

[brupnick]

You learn something new every day. Thanks Tom.