Backup Selection Improvements

[a_user]

Im not sure if this has been discussed before but the one issue I feel strongly about with Veeam Backup is the lack of ability to select multiple VM's by host during job setup or modification. What I mean is this. You select a host that has the VM's you want to back up, if you do not want to backup every VM on a host you have to go through the list, highlight a VM and then click the >> button. You have to repeat this for every VM on the host. You should be able to highlight numerous VM's at once add the multiple selected hosts once.

In a case like ours we are running some r900's with upwards of 70's vms in our qa and dev environments, maybe 50% of them we want to backup. Now repeat this across 4 different servers and its a heck of a tedious process.

Perhaps the ability to filter backup selection of VM's by VM names, etc might also help in only displaying the VM's with similiar naming conventions, ie Production - vm1, Production - VM2, QA - VM17, QA-VM23, etc.

Just a suggestion that I think would help a lot of others in similiar large environments with lots of vm's to pick through.

[Gostev]

Hello, have you considered using VM folders to organize your jobs? I know that currently many of our larger customers are organizing backup jobs on VM folders basis. This gives dynamic job scope, so you don't need to edit your jobs when new VMs are added into environment: all you need to do is to move the new VM into the corresponding VM folder.

[a_user]

i do not have the option to select folders i have previously created to categorize my vm's in the backup selection. only the esx host or the individual vm's.

[Gostev]

That's right, but there are also two little buttons on top of that control (to the right) which allow for toggling between default infrastructure view, and VMs and folders view.

[a_user]

Ahh your talking about actual folders. I was referring to resource groups. Folders are an unmanagable way of categorizing your vm's in a large environment with multiple hosts since you are limited in assigning resource pools in that matter. Not to mention the ability of moving already created VM's to folders. Perhaps the ability to categorize by resource pool as well, should be added in future releases.

[Gostev]

One thing we have already added to Veeam Backup 4.0 is ability to exclude VMs from job, so that should address your issue since you will be able to configure job by adding some top-level container, while at the same time exclude certain unnecessary VMs.

On another note, can you please clarify why folders are unmanageable way of categorizing VMs in large environment ("you are limited in assigning resource pools in that matter"). What do you mean by this VM folders and resource pools issue? I am not sure I understand this.