Remove deleted VMs after....

[Peter Just]

I am trying to understand this functionality and whether it is applicable to my situation. We have a policy to keep VMs around for 90 days after they are decommissioned. At the moment I have a number of inactive VMs sitting in my infrastructure. My thought was to back them up into into a single job and repository. My idea is to have a rolling backup job for decommissioned servers. Each time it's time to take one down, it gets put in this job, a backup runs and then it's deleted from the infrastructure. If I run a backup and set the "remove deleted vms after" to 90 days, will that automatically remove those vms after 90 days?

[foggy]

Hi Peter, yes, it will do so. However, there might be no need to create a separate job for such VMs, this works in your other jobs as well - if the VM is not registered in VI anymore, it's blocks will be removed (actually marked as free) from backup file after the specified number of days. Just keep in mind that if the retention for the job itself is shorter than the deleted VMs retention, they might be deleted earlier, if full backups took place within that period. Thanks.

[Peter Just]

Thank you. To clarify. As I run these jobs and remove VMs from my inventory, should I remove them from the job as well? If I leave them in the job, I will get an error that the VM is no longer present. I realize this is expected. But does that failure affect the retention?

[foggy]

No need to remove VM from the job, the warning is expected and doesn't affect the retention mechanism.