Manual Backup of Single VM on a Multi-VM VMware Policy

So, will it not allow you to "right click the policy, select 'manual backup...' and then select the schedule you would like, and the client you would like" ? That is how I run individual backups of my large VM policies.

Under Change Policy > Clients, do you have "Virtual Machines for Backup" set to "Select Manually" or "Select Automatically Through Query"?

We have ours set to Auto/Query with particular machines excluded from the policy.  

No. I attached a screenshot. I thought that this is weird because other policies allow me to select individual machines. 

That may be exactly it. I do ours manually, and I am not sure how they react to an auto-query. I can verify that it breaks. Give me a few minutes!

Welp, unfortunately I cant test that I am sorry :( Our Hyper-V hosts are all 2012R2 and it appears netbackup does not support it yet! I think you may be on the right track with auto/manual.

Re-run of failed backup using a query is a "known issue". There is not really beautiful solution - I am intro writing a Perl script that will detect failed backup by using annotation field set by the Netbackup VMware plugin host. Script still to be written however ....

The 7.6 VMware admin manual has the following note:

Restarting jobs individually in the Activity Monitor

If the policy automatically selects virtual machines for backup, you can restart the virtual machine jobs individually. This feature is handy if the policy backs up a large number of virtual machines: you can restart one or moreof the jobs individually rather than re-running the entire policy.
To restart jobs individually in the Activity Monitor

◆ In the Activity Monitor, right-click on the job and select Restart Job.
In some cases, to restart a child job you may have to restart its parent job

Best Regards

Nicolai

That was my first thought. Horribly inneficient, especially when you backup on a massive scale, but it works.

For a VMware policy type with query based client selection, Netbakup discover and creates the client list run time.This is done dynamically so you will not find the list of client to run manual backup of selected client.To run backup of selected clients for testing, you will need to create another policy with manual client confiuration .

From Technote HOWTO44502

When the backup job runs, NetBackup creates a list of the virtual machines that currently meet the query rules and backs them up.

Configuring automatic virtual machine selection (Query Builder in Basic Mode)

 http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO44502

We have two 2012R2 servers in a cluster getting backed up. They are in a different policy, excluded from the VMware backups, and have the 2012R2 7.5.0.6 client installed directly.