V5 Recommended Backup Policies

[Rumple]

Looking for Idea's/thoughts on how to handle disk exclusions while making backups as simple as possible.

Is it better to set the disks I needed excluded to independant and then during the backups these will be skipped automatically. This way I can just select a datastore or folder for backup and everything gets included, but also skipped as needed
Can i select a folder and then under exclusions it will list foldername (all disk). If I add an exclusion to this list, is V5 smart enough to parse this list of inclusions (all disks) and then accuratly skip the disks as defined by the individual vm's as listed?
What I am trying to avoid is selecting each VM individually if at all possible.

[Bunce]

Unless I've missed something - its pretty dodgy the way it works at the moment.

Its not actually an 'exclusion' its an 'inclusion' which makes it annoying to try and exclude, say, a common disk that is used for windows page-file in every server.

I thought by adding a disk with the same identifier to each server it would be easy to exclude but found that you need to go in manually for each VM and specify the disks you want to include - as you've found.

Needs to be improved.

[Gostev]

you need to go in manually for each VM and specify the disks you want to include

No need. You can apply disk exclusion settings on container objects as well, not just individual VMs.

[Bunce]

So how would I exclude disk 0:5 from all my VM's?

[Vitaliy S.]

Andrew, you need to add a VM container (datastore, host, vCenter Server etc.), then choose "exclude disks" options while standing on that object.

[Bunce]

So on the 'Edit Backup Job' page, I select the 'Exclusions..' button
-> Then go to the 'Disks' tab
-> Select the container, and click 'Edit'..

The only item I see is 'VM disks to process': with options:
-> All disk
-> Disk: 0:0 only
-> Selected disks

Are we talking about the same thing?

[Vitaliy S.]

Well...yes. If you need to exclude a particular disk, just choose Selected disks->Select All, then uncheck unwanted disk and that's it. This configuration would be applied to the entire VM set, so there is no need to do a manual configuration for each VM.

[Bunce]

Ok - so the 'disks' tab is actually an inclusion process as opposed to an exclusion like the VM's and Templates Tab.

I hadn't thought of using the 'select all' option as I figured it would error out when it came across a VM that didn't have a disk at all those SCSI location, and since various VM's will naturally have a different number of disks depending on its purpose (eg DATA and LOG volume's for SQL / XGE etc), then I would need to set them individually.

Will give it a try - thanks.