Automatic Backup of new VMs?

[Paule]

Hello,
we are currently looking for a backup/recovery solution for our new virtual environment.
It's going to be an ESXi cluster with about 200 VMs for the start, growing rapidly each week.
As we would like to automate the Cluster as much as possible, new VMs will be created by the admins via vCloud Director.

My main questions are:
Is there a way to get Veeam Backup & Replication to take new VMs into the Backup Schedule automatically?

Has anyone recovered VMs into vCloud Director? I am afraid the UID of the VM might change during restore and thus, the VM will not be recognized as the old one (not being listed in the vApps directory any more).

[foggy]

Hello!

You can create a folder hierarchy in vCenter grouping your VM's into logical containers based on some criteria and specify these folders rather than individual VMs while creating your backup jobs. If you then place а new machine in the folder, it will be automatically backed up by the corresponding job.

Regarding your second question, it depends on the way vCloud Director tracks individual VMs. VBR preserves VM moref ID when restoring it to its original location (over existing VM), but the VM UUID is changed during restoration.

Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

In addition to folder hierarchy you can use datastores/hosts as containers for newly provisioned VMs.

[htwnrva]

We backup at the datastore level for precisely this reason.

[tsightler]

Regarding your second question, it depends on the way vCloud Director tracks individual VMs. VBR preserves VM moref ID when restoring it to its original location (over existing VM), but the VM UUID is changed during restoration.

To add a little to this, if you need to perform a restore of a VM that still exist in vCD the easiest option is to simply restore the Virtual Disk (VMDK files) but not the entire VM. This allows you preserve the UUID and will not affect vCD at all.

On the other hand, if the VM has indeed been deleted, then the best option is to deploy a new, identically configured VM via VCD, and then perform the restore of the virtual disks.

[Paule]

Thanks for all your replies, this helps us a lot with planning the backup.
Another question that came to my mind is: If I delete a VM via vCD or vCenter, what will happen to the backed up files in the Veeam Repository? Will the backups stay in place, or will they be deleted, as the VM no longer exists?
If so, is there a setting to define, who long after a VM has been deleted, the backup files should be kept?

[dellock6]

You can define the retention period of a deleted VM by the advanced setting "Deleted VMs data retention period".

About vCloud, another option (the one we choosed) is to backup at the Resource Pool level, since every RP refers to a different tenant, so at the end you have one backup job per tenant. And if you choose to let customers login to Veeam via the web restore, you can set permissions to their backup only.

Luca.

[Gostev]

Note that "Deleted VMs data retention period" defines how long VM data remain in the transformed synthetic fulls (all backup modes that maintain single VBK file) before its blocks are marked as unused. If you are using the backup mode with multiple full backups, you have to take care of preserving older full backups yourself according to the required retentions, since new fulls will only contain VMs which are actually present in the infrastructure. Thanks.

[ErikSi]

In response to put VM's in a folder. I have my jobs point to a vmware folder. But the problem i noticed is that in "Guest processing" "Advanded" you only see the folder and not the VM's so you can't set different user credentials for VM's
Is there a way around this ? except for not using folders to do backups..

[foggy]

Haven't you noticed the Add VM button in the Advanced Options dialog?

[ErikSi]

Yes i did notice the Add button
The thing that i did not know is that if i add the VM and edit the login, will this server be backupped twice ? once in the folder and once from the added vm ?

[foggy]

No, each VM will be backed up once. Settings for the individual VM have higher priority than those of the folder.