SRM placeholder exemption or tag?

[wwx500]

We've recently implemented Veeam B/R and Veeam-One in a high availability VMware environment that consists of two datacenters, multiple vcenters and aprox 1600 vms. Veeam backup runs great, however I'm having a challenge where Veeam is unable to differentiate between a vm and an SRM placeholder. To put this in perspective, we use and "flip" SRM every 3 months to move our environment's processing and vms between these two sites. When this happens the Vm that used to backup in Veeam job ABC in site A is no longer there and has been replaced by an SRM placeholder. The same vm is now in site B where the placeholder was, but now with a new id. We have two Veeam server environments, one for each datacenter.

The quick solution was to make backup groups (container groups when possible) for vms that "flip" with SRM. I enable them for backups when the site is active and disable when inactive. Still, this needs improvement. Has anyone been through this before and is there a way via scripts or tags to identify and exclude placeholders within high availability environments?

The other gotchya is I've recently exceeded the VeeamOne license threshold for sockets because Veeam One is also counting all placeholders. I went through the inclusion and exclusion rules and it's still not under the threshold. Unfortunately we're more likely to just turn a lot of Veeam One's functionalities off or disable a large chunk like non-prod as creating flip switch groups within license inclusion/exclusion that require manual intervention every 3 months or more is too much of a manual cost. Veeam One has some cool capabilities and I'm still learning about it so I'd like to try and simplify all these SRM issues.

Veeam support acknowledged that Veeam can't identify SRM placeholders and suggested I come here. Case 02383255.
Any ideas or experiences on this topic would be appreciated.
My hunch is there should be a way through powershell to run a query that tells me whether a vm is real or an SRM placeholder. If real then add to backup group. As for Veeam One I'll probably have to cut out a large chunk of nonprod.

[MichaelCade]

Hi William,

Your SRM placeholders should be residing in their own Placeholder Datastore? if thats the case then you can just exclude that from the backup job. This is not the same datastore that the "real" data has been replicated too.

see this article on how to exclude - https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95

I also have a customer that is using folders to segregate these placeholder VMs.