Feature Request - Exclusions

[fast_cat]

does anyone else see the benefit of having a global exclusion list for VM's that we dont want backing up with Veeam ? I know I can do this for each Veeam job but I dont want to keep modifying jobs.
With Vmotion, storage vmotion and the very dynamic nature of a virtual environment where VMs can come and go and migrate very easily I just want a list held globally in Veeam that contains all the VMs that I want to exclude regardless of which job they may appear in. So when a job runs whether the backup is by datastore, esx host, folder, etc I just want to make sure any VM in my global exclude list doesnt get backed up.

regards
Rob

[Cokovic]

We are doing this by creating a NO_Backup resource pool and adding this pool to the exclusion list in every job. So if a VM should be excluded from backup i'm just moving it into this resource group and thats it. No need to edit any job.

[foggy]

Interesting request, Rob, thanks. However, while I admit there are probably use cases for that, you can avoid modifying jobs in dynamic environments even now organizing your jobs by VM folders, for example, or using a special container for such VMs, as Haris has just described.

[fast_cat]

Thanks for the info so far...

We tried organizing jobs by VM folders, but our folders vary dramatically in size from 2 VMs to 100 VMs as we use folders for other reasons ( not for backup jobs) so we dont want to define our backup jobs by folders. We currently define jobs by a VMFS datastore. And whilst I agree we can add an exclusion list to every job, we dont want to use folders, resource pools are only cluster specific so we would need to choose the correct resource pool for each job...etc..

[Cokovic]

We've got the same setup as you. Backup jobs created by LUNs. And you are right. Resource pools are per cluster. So i've got this resource pool added to each cluster and when creating a job i'm just adding every NO_Backup resource pool to the exclusion list. So even if i'm going to move a VM to another cluster i can still put it in this NO_Backup resource pool and it will not be backed up.

But how would you maintain such a global exclusion list? In our setup for example we've got eight hardware based Veeam servers running for backing up our virtual infrastructure. Every Veeam Server with it's own database. Integrating such a global exclusion list into Veeam B&R would mean i had to maintain these lists on every single server as they are not aware of each other. The only central instance i could imagine would be the Enterprise Manager. Just dont know if it would be possible to integrate such a feature there.

[fast_cat]

Or what may be nicer...is to use Vmware annotated fields (since Veeam can already use this to record when a backup was last run), maybe Veeam backup jobs can automatically exclude VMs that have a "No Backup" setting in an annotated field ?

[DaFresh]

As fast_cat said, this can be done with 'VM and tempaltes view' in vSphere, I use this method for backup and replication jobs, mainly to exclude some VM of the replication, then you have just to select to use the needed folder in your jobs selection, for example :

+ ROOT FOLDER
+ backuped but not replicated VM (folder used in backup job, VM in subfolders are included too)
+ backuped and replicated VM (folder used in replication job)
+ excluded VM (not used in any backup/replication job)

Of course this imply to maintains well the folders organization ...

[foggy]

Or what may be nicer...is to use Vmware annotated fields (since Veeam can already use this to record when a backup was last run), maybe Veeam backup jobs can automatically exclude VMs that have a "No Backup" setting in an annotated field ?

Not through UI. Probably you could use PowerShell to read the attribute of each VM and then exclude VMs based on that, however this does not look like a solid solution to me.