Feature request: exclude VHDs for tagged VMs

[rm76]

When I'm adding VMs to Backup job by tag, I cannot exclude VM hard disks.
I think tha it would be useful if in Exclusions dialog I would be able to type custom VM name and select hard disks to be excluded from backup.
If VM with given name does not have a tag included to job - this exclusion setting can be ignored.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Egor!

Thanks for the interesting request. I will note it down, however I can see some challenges with said approach:
- currently under Exclusions we show the list of added to the job VMs - for ease of picking, you don't want to choose from VMs that are not backed up, right? With Tags, to show you a list of tagged VMs we will have to run additional VM Discovery during job creation(currently it runs and discovers VMs when backup is triggered). Which might be slow, depending on the infrastructure. I can see some workarounds here, like manual discovery button...
- If there would be a custom VM Name field, we will have to run additional discovery as well, plus there could be conflicts - when Veeam discovers VMs, we track down Name and MoRefID - so two virtual machines with identical names could be treated as different, for example: "FS01" from non-clustered Esxi01 and "FS01" from Esxi02 are different VMs for us. So VM Name is not ideal.

If you don't want a disk to be backed up, you can always change it to Independent Persistent mode and it will be skipped from backup no matter which job backs up said VM, no matter of Tags, no matter of Exclusion rules - it simply won't be snapshotted.

/Cheers!

[JustinIzzard]

+1 vote for this feature with the manual discovery option in the exclusions window. Or when the add button is clicked in the disk exclusion window, display VMs that have the tag(s) selected in the job and choose the ones that require exclusions from the list.