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, please open the Backup SLAs tab under the Virtual Environments section and click on 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 assignment 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. If you have already created a schedule, you can also select it.

Other

This is an optional section with two switches:

• 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

Two examples when using switches is 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 you are backing up a set of machines, and if even one is not secured, there is no point in backing up the rest.

At the end, save settings.

You can also perform the same action using the CLI interface: CLI Reference