Excluding or including virtual machines from scheduled backup services

You can use the IBM Spectrum Protect™ vSphere Client plug-in to include or exclude virtual machines (VMs) from scheduled backup services. You can include or exclude all VMs in an inventory object or individual VMs.

About this task

Typically, the VMs in your VMware datacenter are protected by scheduled backup services with IBM Spectrum Protect for Virtual Environments: Data Protection for VMware. In some scenarios, you might want to exclude a VM from scheduled backups. For example, you might exclude a VM if it is used only for testing or if it is accessed infrequently.

In other scenarios, you might want to back up only VMs in a certain level of vSphere inventory objects.

The virtual machines must be in a protection set that is protected by a schedule or a schedule group. A protection set consists of the virtual machines in a container that is assigned the Schedule (IBM Spectrum Protect) tag.

You can set the include and exclude option for server backups, local backups, or both.

Procedure

Select an inventory object in the vSphere Web Client and complete one of the following actions. You can select a datacenter, folder (Host and Cluster folders and VM and Template folders), host, host cluster, resource pool, or VM.
- Click Actions > IBM Spectrum Protect > Configure Data Protection.
- VMware vSphere 6.0 or earlier: Click Manage > IBM Spectrum Protect > Edit.
- VMware vSphere 6.5 or later: Click Configure > IBM Spectrum Protect > Edit.
On the Server page of the Configure Backup Policies wizard, select an item from the Exclude from backup list:
- Yes - Excludes the VM from scheduled backups.
- No - Includes the VM in scheduled backups. This selection is the default.
  Select No to ensure that VMs are included in scheduled backups regardless of inherited settings.
If the selected object is a VM, the Exclude from backup setting applies only to the selected VMs.
Tip: If an inheritance icon and object name are displayed in a field, the data protection setting that is shown is inherited from that higher-level inventory object. By changing this setting, you are overriding the inherited property for the current object level and any lower-level objects. For more information about inheritance of data protection settings, see Inheritance of data protection settings.
If the wizard contains only the Server page, click Finish.
If the wizard contains the Server and Local pages, click Next and set the Exclude from backup option for local backups. You can set the same or different value for the Exclude from backup option for server and local backups.

Results

VMs that are in the excluded VMware objects will not be backed up in future scheduled backup operations. However, you can still run an on-demand backup of an excluded object.