VMware query builder - best way to group Servers / backups

[BirtyBassett]

Hi all, we are in the deployment stage of NBU and have come to the point where we need to start creating our policies.  "The Dream" scenario is to have the policies configured in such a way that we will no longer have to manually create a backup job / policy for each server / system when they are created within vSphere. Ideally, when a server is built, the policy will catch it and it will automatically get backed up.  Is that feasible and does anyone else configure it this way?

For this to work however I guess you need to have some some of naming convension for server names or have the vmware builder query based on the name of the folder within vSphere (Home->Inventory->VM's and Templates).  We have folders within vSphere at present which are named according to the team that look safter them e.g. "Messaging servers" contains all the Exchange and Lync servers" or "Networking servers" contains the DHCP, Radius, ets server.  The problem with this is that in some cases there are all sorts of systems (Windows 2003, 2012, Ubumntu, Load Balancer appliances) grouped together which wouldn't work if you based the policy on folder name.

Renaming our servers is obvously not an option so I think we'll have to do it based on folder names.  For this I am envisiging the folder names to be something like "WIN_APP" for all Windows application servers and "WIN_DB" for all Windows database servers, etc.

How do you guys configure it?

Also, another question I have is; In the above example where we have all Exchange servers (CAS, HUB. MBX) and Lync servers within a single vmware folder and created a vmware policy based on that folder name, what would happen if we enabled the Exchange integration options within the Application Protection section?  Would that means that all servers would be backd up and the Exchange woudl only apply to the mailbox servers within that folder?  The same applies for SQL or SharePoint servers.

Thanks in advance,

Graham

[RiaanBadenhorst · Accepted solution]

Hi,

This really comes down to how much or how little "order" there is in your environment in terms of naming standards. You've already identified the fact that if everything is named well you can just use wild card to include it. If the server naming is a bit a random you could target containers like folders, datastores, etc, and then just exclude what you don't want, which might be easier than including what you need.

As for the Application protection, if enabled a connection to the client would be attempted. So if you don't have the client installed it would give a 47. I'm not sure how it would behave when the client is installed but no application (sql, exhange, sps) is found. Might need to do a quick test on that front.

Hope that helps a bit.

[BirtyBassett]

Cheers Riaan, that has definitely helped.  I think this has highlighted that fact that we have room for improvement in terms of our vSphere organisation and to this end we have commenced a restructure which in turn will help cut down on the number of policies we have.

Re application protection I guess we'll just have to test and see how it goes.

Thanks again.

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Good luck!