How to run a manual backup for a particular VM from an Vmware Intelligent policy

[avinash7]

I have a vmware policy where I use the query builder to add the client VMs. I have more than a 50 VMs being backed up using the policy.

How can I run the backup for one of the VMs from the policy ?

for e.g. say I have 50 VMs - VM1 to VM50 and I need to run the backup for VM20 say manually. How can I do that ?

I dont want to remove all remaining 49 vms and keep the one Vm in the policy to re-run. I can create a new policy where I can add the Vms manually and add them, but they dont use the netbackup accelerator and take a long time to backup. Is there any way to run a manual backup from the original policy ?

[sdo · Accepted solution]

edit the query:

blah="x" or blah="y"

...surround entire query in pair of round brackets to get:

( blah="x" or blah="y" )

...then add an AND clause:

( blah="x" or blah="y" ) AND ( vmname="theoneIwant" )

...execute policy, one backup client should queued...

...then edit the query again, and remove the temporary AND clause.

[BTLOMS]

We have more than 2000 clients seperated into about 200 to 400 clients per policy. When a VM fails backup for what ever reason, we have a seperate policy that runs one-off backups for the failed clients. We add these failed clients manuallty  into that policy. With proper tuning, you should get pretty much the same speed. If we have more than 20 clients that failed backups we use bpplclients command to manually add through a script.

[Michal_Mikulik1]

Hello,

well, Avinash key point is that the original policy is using Accelerator. I think that two accelerator-based VMware policies wont work for a certain VM correctly (however it is difficult to find any Veritas/VMware KB for this topic..).

Regards

Michal

[X2]

To chipin my approach - my regular VMware policies backup all VMs in a cluster. This is achieve by making the query look for VMs in say "Cluster01". Thus, there are as many queries as clusters in the VMware environment.

To backup a VM separately, I have a query which looks for an annotation e.g. NBU=F (F for a Full backup). The policy has a Full schedule but no backup window (only manual submissions).

The process is: add the annotation "NBU=F" in the VM's Notes filed and run the policy manually. In case, there are multiple VMs to be backed up using this policy, I would approach this by adding the annotation using PowerCLI.

[sdo]

Hi X2 - so this other query is another policy?  Which (I think) is not what the OP needs.  The OP needs a method of re-running one client in its original policy so that Accelerator is not defeated.

[X2]

@sdoyes, you are right, it is a separate policy. The approach was used so that the original production policies are not touched, hence reducing the possibility of any issues.

I understand the accelerator requirement, but as I have only two sites to backup (separated by < 300m and connected via SAN), single VM backup (on demand) using separate policy is sufficient for the environment.

[sdo]

Thanks X2... no worries.  And, thanks for clarifying.   :)