Dynamic vs Static container

gecko1507 wrote: I'm hoping someone might be able to assist with the following, basically trying to understand VMware and avamar integration: My question is essentially this: I have a vCenter instance added to my Avamar system, I then want to "import" the clients within that vcenter instance. I select a container, lets call it "Network" - within that container there are 5 x vms, vm1, vm2, vm3, vm4 and vm5. I select "Dynamic" and "Recursive Protection", expand the "Network container and highlight all 5 vms + the Network container When imported into Avamar I see a "Network" container and when I expand that container I see the 5 vm's - so gar so good. I now want to create a backup group for these vm's In Policy I select "New Backup Group" and after naming the group eg: "Test" I choose the dataset, schedule, retention period and then get to the members selection tab. If I select "Network" at a container level, all 5 vms will be backed up, great, but I only want to back up vm1 and vm2 so I unselect the container and click on each vm individually, which then shows me the individual vms in the members list, not the container so my question is this: Is that container still Dynamic? If a new vm was added to "Network" would it automatically get added to the "Test" backup group and be backed up as per the dynamic setting of the container? Or, because we have not added the Container "Network" to the group, just the individual vm's, anything added to that container would not get added to the "Test" backup group and will therefore not automatically get backed up? Does this mean that containers imported into Avamar can only be dynamic as long as you ONLY want to backup EVERYTHING within that container? Also, when you import a container as dynamic - is there a way to edit it to change to change it back to static because I can't find where if there is - Any opinions/feedback/answers appreciated. Neil

I have not tested what you have described but we do use dynamic containers and in the policy we select the container and not individual VMs.  Anytime new VM gets added to the folder in vCenter, Avamar picks it up (discover process runs 1 hour before your job is scheduled to start) and starts backing it up. Why not use static if you want to manually select what VMs get backed up ?

Hey again dynamo,

Thanks for replying again.

I may not have described my question so clearly.

I need the container to be dynamic so that any new vm's get backed up, however, there are some vm's in that container that I do not want to back up - when adding them to the group if I add the container it will back everything up - that will not work here. If I add individual vm's the container is not included in the group and therefore any new vm's added to that container will not get backed up - that will not work here either.

What I basically need to know is can I select the container to be added to the group but exclude some vm's from within that container from being backed up?

I'm not sure if I have made it any clearer but...............

Neil

Neil,

i don't think container has an "exclude" feature, it's either all or nothing. When we considered switching to container based backups i told my VM guys to create folder structure in vCenter that will allow them to exclude VMs from backups so they created a flat structure that looks something like this:

Linux-Prod

Linux-Dev

Windows-Prod

Windows-Dev

No-Avamar

The first 4 folders were added as dynamic/recursive, so now whenever they build a new VM they just need to place it into one of the 4 folders and Avamar will back it up. VMs they don't want to backup (XtremIO XMS for example), get placed into No-Avamar backups.