How to exclude vmdk files from Avamar Image level backup

Glad you asked, I'm seeking the answer to that same question.

Hello,

there is a workaround, you can set the vmdk you don't want do backup as "Indipendent" in the disk options. This way the disks are unaffected by snapshots and can not be backuped by Avamar

Regards

Cristiano

Sappomanno,

Please read original post - I know everything about VMware options. What about Avamar?

Sorry, my fault, was to quick in answering. Unfortunately I konw no way to perform this via Avamar options.

Regards

Cristiano

Currently you can make that vmdk independent disk and during backup it will be skipped.

Try to create a avtar.cmd file to exclude the files you want to skip from backing up.

Hey,

I also suggest you to try using avtar.cmd file to exclude VMDK files.

Create an avtar.cmd file which is contain the following option.

--exclude-from=FILE |

--exclude_from=FILE | -X FILE

Description:

Specifies the FILE containing a list of matching patterns used to exclude files from a backup or restore.

Common glob operators (wildcards) such as asterisk (*) and question mark (?) are allowed.

When specifying exclusions, case sensitivity varies according to the target computing platform you are backing up.

Exclusions specified for Windows platforms are not case-sensitive; exclusions specified for most other platforms are case-sensitive.

Either --exclude-from=FILE, --exclude_from=FILE or -X FILE can be used.

Multiple exclude files can be used. However, each one must be preceded by a separate --exclude-from=FILE option.

Hope this helpful.

I'm not sure why we resurrected a 2 year old thread about Avamar 5. In any case, I'm going to recommend against the advice from the previous posters. Please do not edit avtar.cmd on the VMware Image proxy unless specifically asked to do so by support. Putting the wrong flag in avtar.cmd can cause issues that are subtle and very difficult to diagnose.

Excluding VMDK files this way has plenty of pitfalls:

• The backup data is streamed into avtar directly from the VMware Image plug-in so avtar is never given the original VMDK name, only the name that should be assigned to the flat file in the backup. That means you'd have to know this name to exclude the disk.
• The disk flat files will be assigned the same names for every VM (though the path will be different). If you exclude a flat file by filename, this will (silently) affect all the VMs backed up by the proxy where avtar.cmd was edited.
• There are no guarantees which proxy will pick up a particular backup job so the excludes would have to be added to avtar.cmd on every proxy. This will rapidly turn into a management nightmare.

Starting in Avamar 6.1, it's possible to exclude specific disks using the GUI. This method does have some limitations (Storage vMotion can cause issues because the datastore name changes, for example) but is sufficient for most use cases.

Ian, can you please point to the instructions to exclude files.

We have 1-2TB of SQL DBs inside VMs. we want to run OS backups as image and exclude the DB VMDKs. this will avoid configuration effort by OS teams.

for DB , we are running agent based backups.

You should find instructions on how to selectively back up VMDKs in the Avamar for VMware User Guide. However, this method also has some pitfalls around datastore and file names as I mentioned above. If you are not using VM snapshots for anything else, the cleanest solution will be to mark the data volumes as independent because this setting persists regardless of filenames, storage vMotion, etc.