Breaking down backup jobs by purpose

[collinp]

We have a large VMWare cluster of 500 VM's with 10 hosts in the cluster. To reduce one massive backup job of 500 VM's and potentially a weekly 100TB synthetic full, we have broken the backup jobs down per host vs per cluster. There are about 50 VM's per host. We would like to have 3 different types of backup jobs per host: test/dev vm's backup to a local respository, vm's with sensitive data get encrypted, and remaining production vm's get backed up to a scaleout repository in copy mode to the cloud. But I don't see a way in the job settings to target a) a host and b) either a VM container or c) tags. I can choose a vm container for the entire cluster which would include 100's of vm's or I can choose tags per cluster which would also contain 100's of vm's. Is there a way to accomplish what I need where I can pin the backup job at a host as well as a vm container or tag?

Thank you!

Collin

[foggy]

Hi Collin, do you mean you need an intersection of a host and a tag so that only VMs having the specified tag and running on a specific host are backed up? Otherwise, you can select any container at any level within the cluster at the step when you select the VMs to be backed up.

[collinp]

Yes, I need an intersection of either host and tag or host and vm container

[oleg.feoktistov]

Hi Collin,

Powershell is your friend here. The best way to settle this I can think of is to filter out entities using PowerCLI, compare them to ViItems and then add to backup job.

Thanks,
Oleg

[collinp]

We are using powershell scripts now but want to get out of the custom scripting business.

[collinp]

Is there no answer here or future enhancements for this item?

"I need an intersection of either host and tag or host and vm container"
"want to get out of the custom scripting business."

[foggy]

I can only suggest adding a container or a host as a job source and adding the tag as an exclusion, as a workaround. So a bit more work with setting some other tag to VMs that currently do not have the existing tag to further filter them out via exclusions. Or adding the existing tag as the job scope and excluding all other hosts as another option.

[collinp]

I'm ok with a workaround for now but I think it would be a good enhancement in the future to be able to narrow down job scopes to be a little bit more granular. There are so many different types of backups that people are doing that require different settings and it is expensive to try to build vm clusters around these job types, it takes a lot of hardware. It would be easier to logically divide these jobs out within the Veeam backup settings by intersecting host and tag or host and vm folder.

[foggy]

I see your points here, it makes sense. Thanks for the feedback!