We’ve done a big hardware refresh and are migrating all our VMs to a new Virtual Center. Our backup environment is not changing at this time so all the storage, media agents etc are all set up and happy already.

I thought I’d take the opportunity to “modernise” our backups at the same time, starting to use plans instead of storage and schedule policies and hopefully get to the point where we can largely leave the java console behind and use the Command Center. Our Commvault environment is very mature (20 years) and a lot of work has gone into keeping it in good shape over the years, through many upgrades and hardware refreshes. It works beautifully. So I am pretty old school and very familiar with the old console. Not loving plans if I’m honest, we have two on prem blocks of storage and one cloud library, and we tend to keep everything on the same retention periods. We do use a lot of different schedules so I’m finding the concept where it creates a whole new storage policy for every schedule tough to accept, but I will have to get used to it.

Something I am really struggling with though is that we have a number of VMs that do not get included in the VMware backup - I’m talking test/dev machines, some appliances that don’t have any dynamic data, that sort of thing. I don’t have the licencing nor the storage to just backup everything. However I can’t seem to find how to exclude these globally like you can in commcell console (right click on defaultbackupset, VM filters, tick the VMs you don’t want backed up, this then covers all the subclients). It’s not really the case is it that I have to configure all these exclusions on EVERY VM group is it? Please tell me I just haven’t looked in the right place? We’re on 11.32, I have an upgrade to 11.36 in the pipeline but can’t do it yet. Maybe it’s in this version? Should I just do it in the commcell console the old way?

Thanks for any advice or guidance.