Policies

Policies allow you to group virtual machines in many ways. For example, based on the type of hypervisor.

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

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

General

Under this section, you can set up:

• The policy name

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

• Set the priority for tasks

Auto-assignment

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

• Mode

  • Disabled

  • Assign only

  • Assign and remove

• Include or exclude rules based on hypervisor tags or regular expressions matching the VM name, i.e.:

  • regular expression examples:

    • .* match any character any number of times

    • vm-[0-9][0-9][0-9] - match the name that starts with vm- and 3 digits

    • (prod|uat|dev)-[0-9][0-9][0-9][a-z]? - match the name that starts with 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

  • VMs will not be reassigned to a different policy if they already have a matching policy assigned

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

  • rules are joined with the OR operator, so

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

    • if no rule (tag or matched regular expression) excludes the VM, 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.

Virtual Environments

Here, you can easily select virtual machines manually.

Rule

This section is used to select the backup destination.

Note. You can select Primary and Secondary Backup Destintanion 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. Four properties 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 the number of versions has been reached or the backup is older than the given limit), is removed from the backup destination.

Immutable backup

An immutable backup is a feature that is used to prevent modification or deletion of backups for a predetermined period. That is, immutable backups are read-only until their retention period expires.

Settings

This is an optional section with the following option:

• Quiesce/freeze before snapshot

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

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

• Visibility for all projects

In the end, save settings.

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