How to exclude powered off VMs?

[BenConrad]

Hi,

We're looking at Veeam Backup for our environment of ~480 VMs. Looking for a replacement for vRanger, I'll probably be posting a bunch of questions in the near future.

We need to create a job for a cluster and backup all VMs for that cluster. We want the backup job to automatically skip VMs that are powered off. We don't want to edit the job properties each time a backup runs in order to exclude whichever VMs are turned off at the time. Is this possible, I don't see anything in the GUI/Forums/Manual.

Thanks,

Ben

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Ben,

Welcome to Veeam community forums!
This is not possible at the moment, you should manually edit the job to exclude powered off VMs. Probably you can create separate jobs for VMs which are always powered on (production critical) and another job for VMs that can often be powered off, and run them apart, hope it makes sense.

Thank you

[Gostev]

Ben, which VMs do you want excluded, those powered off at the moment when backup cycle starts? I am asking because the use case is not clear for me. If some VM works during the day, then shutdown for the night - it still needs to be backed up, because it had some changes during the day. Correct?

On the other hand, if VM is never running at all, why keep it on the cluster?

Anyhow, if there are some VMs which almost never run, I would create a special VM folder for such VMs, and then simply add this folder to exclusions for all jobs. This way, only thing you need to be managing is 1 folder. If VM becomes unimportant for backup, you just move it to that folder - and vice versa.

[BenConrad]

Thx Guys,

Gostev,

We may have a VM powered off for 4 weeks before it gets deleted. During those 4 weeks we would not need a backup as the most recent backup would suffice. I guess we can move these powered off VMs to a folder called 'POWERED-OFF' and exclude that from the jobs.

I'm using NBD mode and I noticed that it took 12 minutes to backup a powered off VM that has been powered off for weeks, this output below is for the second backup (synthetic) of this VM:

7 of 7 files processed

Total VM size: 11.50 GB
Processed size: 11.50 GB
Processing rate: 16 MB/s
Backup mode: NBD without changed block tracking
Start time: 12/21/2009 8:39:22 AM
End time: 12/21/2009 8:51:39 AM
Duration: 0:12:16

Ben

[Gostev]

Ben, second backup would be nearly instant for this VM if changed block tracking was enabled and there were no changes since last backup. Do you use ESX4? Basically, without changed block tracking, we have to read through the whole image to understand if it was changed since previous backup.