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Hello everybody,

hope you had a good time and wish you a great 2023!

Let me ask you a little question. We are about to decommission few VMs out of about two hundreds running on a vCenter, therefore we are planning to stop backing up them, but we would like to save the latest full backup for six months. How would you do that?

One idea could be to create a dedicated subclient with the VMs being decommissioned, associate it with a new storage policy with six months retention copy and finally run a manual full backup.

Is there any better (and smarter) option?

Thank you!

Gaetano

You could just right click on the ‘final’ full backup job and choose the retain option. It allows you to manually override the retention of a single job

 

Otherwise your separate subclient would work too. You just have to remember to come back in 6 months and delete or set cycles to 0 with retention of 6 months.

 

Hi @Damian Andre,

the Retain Job solution looks much smarter 😀.

In case I choose to go this way, can I still remove the decommissioned clients from the CommCell and keep the “retained” job?

 

Thank you

Gaetano

Hi @Gaetano ,

You were writing about VMs, so most probably they had a dedicated VSA subclient for each, or were members of an existing subclient. Right?

If so, they are part of a VSA client, whether it is HyperV/VMWare/AWS/Azure/.. hypervisor = Client.

If you plan to remove/delete a Client = Hypervisor, then, all the backups for this Client would be deleted. I guess it’s not what you want to do.

Maybe it’s just a question of terms/vocabulary, and you were meaning ‘subclient’ ? Then in that case you could delete the subclient, and as long as you keep the Client, all the backups of this ‘previous/deleted’ subclient will be kept and get merged to the ‘Default’ VSA subclient of your Hypervisor Client.

 

Hi @Damian Andre,

the Retain Job solution looks much smarter 😀.

In case I choose to go this way, can I still remove the decommissioned clients from the CommCell and keep the “retained” job?

 

In general no - you never want to delete a client. You can hide it (release the license and hide restore only clients from properties of clients view) if needed but deleting a client automatically deletes ALL jobs on ALL media. So its a bad idea for most. If the software asks you to “erase and reuse media” proceed with caution :)

VMs as clients (if you turned the option on to show them) will go away I think 30 days after it is no longer found or protected.

Hi @Damian Andre, 

sorry for my poor wording. You understood it, with “client” I was meaning the single VM shown in the Client Computers group.

So, to confirm my understanding,

  • I should disable backups form each of the VMs being decommissioned via Properties->Activity Control
  • Release the license
  • Retain the latest full as you specified before
  • Hide restore-only clients from the group list
  • After six months manually remove the retained job (?)

Is this correct?

Hi @Damian Andre, 

sorry for my poor wording. You understood it, with “client” I was meaning the single VM shown in the Client Computers group.

So, to confirm my understanding,

  • I should disable backups form each of the VMs being decommissioned via Properties->Activity Control
  • Release the license
  • Retain the latest full as you specified before
  • Hide restore-only clients from the group list
  • After six months manually remove the retained job (?)

Is this correct?

Yes that looks correct!

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