Policies

Policies allow you to group storage instances in many ways. For example, based on the type of storage provider.

To create a new backup policy, open the Backup SLAs tab under the Storage Provider section and click on the Create button on the right.

Now you should see the policy wizard with 5 main sections.

General

Under this section, you can set up:

• Name of policy

• Switch on/off auto-remove non-present virtual environments

• Set the priority for tasks

Auto-assignment

In this section, you can configure automatic policy assignment based on certain criteria:

• Mode

  • Disabled

  • Assign only

  • Assign and remove

• Include or exclude rules based on regular expressions matching storage instance names, i.e.:

  • regular expression examples:

    • .* match any character any number of times

    • st-[0-9][0-9][0-9] - match names that start with st- and 3 digits

    • (prod|uat|dev)-[0-9][0-9][0-9][a-z]? - match names that start with the prod or uat or dev prefix, then -, then 3 digits and an optional lower-case letter (matching is case-sensitive)

  • exclude rules always take precedence over include rules

  • objects may not be reassigned to a different policy if they already have a matching policy assigned

  • objects may be reassigned to a different policy only if the mode is Assign and remove, the current policy assignment rules don't match, and the other policy's rules do match

  • rules are joined with the OR operator, so

    • if any rule (tag or matched regular expression) excludes the storage instance - it will be excluded

    • if no rule (tag or matched regular expression) excludes the storage instance, and any rule (tag or matched regular expression) includes the VM - it will be included

• You can also select clusters to match only VMs that belong to them

Storage

Here, you can easily select storage instances manually.

Rule

This section is used to select the backup destination.

Note. You can select Primary and Secondary Backup Destination in one Rule.

You can also set here Retention settings for your backups. You can use a number of days and versions for full and incremental backups.

If you have already created a schedule, you can also select it or Create New Schedule.

Retention

vPlus handles retention for all backup destinations except NetBackup. There are 4 properties that define how long the backup should be kept in the backup destination:

• Retention (Full) - no. of versions to keep - number of full backups

• Retention (Inc.) - no. of versions to keep - number of incremental backups

• Retention (Full) - no. of days to keep - number of days to keep a full backup

• Retention (Inc.) - no. of days to keep - number of days to keep an incremental backup

Note. If you are using Synthetic File System backup destination, you have only two options for retention:

• Retention - no. of versions to keep - number of full backups

• Retention - no. of days to keep - number of days to keep a full backup

Whichever condition is met first (either number of versions has been reached or the backup is older than the given limit), it is removed from the backup destination.

Other

This is an optional section with two switches:

• Fail the rest of the backup tasks if more than xx% of EXPORT tasks have already failed

• Fail the rest of the backup tasks if more than xx% of STORE tasks have already failed

Here are two examples of when using switches is very useful: It is very likely that if 30% of the backup tasks fail, the remaining tasks will also fail because the environment has failed. Or, if you are backing up a set of storage instances, and if even one is not secured, there is no point in backing up the rest.

At the end, save the settings.

Note. You can also perform the same action thanks to the CLI interface: CLI Reference.