Excluding Pagefile.sys in VM snapshots - NetBackup 7.5

[Kathleen_HW]

I've read a lot of the discussions about excluding drives from vmware backups and using the advanced options.  I have little twist to my issue.

I want to backup everything except the pagefile in my vms.  We have configured our pagefiles to live on a drive of their own, the P drive.  Is it possible to exlude by filename, or a particular drive letter?  If I exclude boot disk, I expect it won't exclude anything because it won't find the boot disk because the pagefile does not live on the same drive as the system files.   If I exclude data disks that will exclude the other drives that have data that we want included.

Anyone have ideas?  I'm running 7.5.0.7, getting ready to upgrade to 7.6.  We have vmware and MS hyperv.

Thanks.

[Kathleen_HW]

Forgot to include..... I DO have selected on the vmware tab, under optimization, Exclude swap and paging files.  But it still includes the page file.  I'm wondering if that's because we do not have it on the boot disk, so it doesn't recognize it as the pagefile.

[INT_RND]

Policy type VMWARE  uses the built-in snapshot functionality of VMWare. It is a complete disk image. The options to exlude the boot disk or data disk are not granular. This is a limitation of the VMWare API. If you exclude the boot disk you are not getting an image of the whole "C:\" drive. If you exclude data disks you are only getting the image of the "C:\" drive.

Workarounds:

1. You could install the Netbackup client and perform a normal Windows file level backup.

2. You could remove the swapfile. (Microsoft advises against this)

About the Exclude disk options for Virtual disk selection:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO71006

[NBU35]

In Vmware policy tab if you opt for option exclude Paging & swapping file, then it will exclude these files.

However you will still find these files in backup, but there size would be 0 KB.

if you are taking snaphot backup, there would be no feature of excluding individual files.

[punbs]

Hope above Check mark in the VMWare Policy Tab will help you to remove the Swap and Page File of Guest OS - VM Image Backup.

[Kathleen_HW]

punbs - Yes, I do have that selected.

ChAmp35 - the pagefiles in my backup DO have size.  They are not 0 bytes.

INT_RND - I suspect your info may be the explanation.

Thanks all for the input!

[Kathleen_HW · Accepted solution]

Found the solution!  Independent, persistent mode drives will be skipped by the snapshot backup.  So for us, because we have our pagefile on a dedicated drive, we changed that drive to be independent persistent mode.  It is automatically skipped!