Virtual machines on a management serverAvailability of virtual machines Virtual machines are displayed as available when both the agent is available for the management server and the machines are available for the agent. The list of virtual machines is refreshed dynamically every time the management server synchronizes with the agents. When the virtualization server or the virtual appliance becomes unavailable or is withdrawn, the virtual machines are grayed out. When virtual machines become unavailable for the agent (this happens when machines are removed from the virtualization server inventory, deleted from the disk, or the server’s storage is down or disconnected), the machines disappear from the All virtual machines groups and other groups they are included in. Tasks that back up these virtual machines will fail with an appropriate log record; as a result, the generative policy will have the Error status. The online or offline state of a virtual machine does not affect its backup since virtual machines can be backed up in both states. Policies for virtual machines Any policy that backs up disks and volumes can be applied to virtual machines as well as to physical machines. Policies that perform file-level backup cannot be applied to virtual machines. For more information about backup and recovery of virtual machines, supported guest operating systems and disk configurations, see “Backing up virtual machines“. What happens when a policy is applied to a group of virtual machines Each machine will be backed up by a separate task to a separate archive. The default archive name will include the virtual machine name and the policy name. It is advisable to keep default archive naming so that you can easily find each machine’s backups in the storage vault. Grouping of virtual machines The Virtual machines section of the navigation tree contains one built-in group called All virtual machines. You cannot modify this group manually, delete or move it. You can apply policies that back up disks or volumes to this group. You can create both static and dynamic groups of virtual machines. Any virtual machine that is currently available can be added to a static group. You cannot create groups that contain both physical and virtual machines. The dynamic membership criteria for virtual machines are as follows:
Using this criterion, you can create a dynamic group of virtual machines hosted on all registered Hyper-V (or ESX/ESXi, respectively) servers. Any machine added to the servers will appear in this group. Any machine deleted from the servers will disappear from this group.
Using this criterion, you can create a dynamic group of virtual machines hosted on a specified virtualization server or managed by the specified virtual appliance. |