BE2012 V-Ray: how to exclude VM logical drives from backup?

[UFO]

Question: If one has virtual machine with some logical drives and wants to backup only few drives, not all - how to do this in Backup Exec V-Ray Edition?

[Colin_Weaver]

You have to do a traditional remote agent backup - a Virtual Agent backup is a snapshot of the machine at VMDK level so will contain everything inside the VMDK

[UFO]

did I get it right?

With BE V-Ray Edition I can backup (snapshot) only the whole VM image

and

Backing up particular logical drives inside Vm is only available with BE + Agent for VMware and Hyper-V?

[Colin_Weaver · Accepted solution]

V-Ray is a licensing concept and not a technical concept as such - all it means is you have a package of licenses enabling you to do Virtual Machine backups

If you have a virtual agents license (either via v-ray or via buying the virtual agent license) this allows you to

1) Do virtual machine backups with GRT enabled. This means you have to backup the complete VM/VMDK but have granular capability to restore individual files should you need to

2) install a remote agent inside any VM running on the host you bought the license for. This remote agent is needed for application GRT (ability to, for example, restore an Exchange e-mail) but can also be used to perform a traditional RAWS backup of the VM if you want.

However a complete VM backup lets you DR the complete VM quickly in the event that you lose the VM, a traditional remote agent backup requires more complicated steps if you need to recover the complete VM

As such you are better off backing up the complete VM with GRT enabled as then you get the most efficient recovery of both single files and the complete VM

[UFO]

Makes it clear, thank you.