Different credentials for vSphere taggged-VMs?

[pufferdude]

I'm pretty sure the answer is "no", but thought I'd ask just to be sure. My current workflow is to select similar/related VMs that belong in the same job via vSphere tags, which allows me to move the VMs between hosts without breaking backups... but I've run into a new situation I've never had before: two VMs with different administrator credentials in the same tag. It looks like when choosing a vSphere tag as the source of the backup, you can only enter one set of credentials shared by all VMs with that tag, vs. the ability to set individual credentials when you choose separate VMs as the sources.

Is this by design? Right now I have two VMs with different admin credentials, and I don't want to make them the same, but I can't back them up via their common tag because the UI has no way to enter separate credentials for each VM. Now that I think about it, this is probably necessary because Veeam doesn't know which VMs are in the tag until the job runs. Duh.

Oh well, I'll just have to treat this job as special and select the individual VMs.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Jim,

I don't have the lab where VMs share the same tag, but what do see when you click on the Credentials button at the Guest Processing tab of the backup job? There should be a way to explicitly select a VM with different guest OS credentials.

Thanks!

[pufferdude]

There is definitely an option to set unique credentials per VM when individual VMs are selected in the job, but when you choose a tag as the source that option goes away (you can only pick one set of credentials for the tag)... I assume because the job doesn't KNOW which VMs it will be processing via that tag until it starts running, so only one set of credentials can be stored in the job and applied to all VMs with that tag.

It would be cool if there were a "try these credentials, and if they fail on a VM, try these instead" option, though!

[tsightler]

It's absolutely possible to set separate credentials for a different VM even when using tags (or any container object for that matter), but it might not be clear how to do so. If, in the "Virtual Machines to backup" screen, you have selected a vSphere Tag, then when you go to the "Credentials" screen it will only display the tag, however, on this screen you can click "Add" and it will bring up the hierachy browse screen. On this screen you can select your tag again, expand it and it will show all the VMs with that tag. Select the specific VM (or VMs) that you need to override and click the "Add" button, and now the "Credentials" screen will have both your tag, and the individual VM listed, and you can override the credential for just that VM.

I hope that explanation is clear, I can try to do screenshots and upload if not.

[pufferdude]

Awesome! Your explanation makes sense... I will try it out and see how it goes. Thanks so much for the detail!

[pufferdude]

This worked perfectly, just as you described (just not obvious until you know about it.) Thanks again.