Description

With the currently supported versions of Backup Exec, you can backup a virtual machine by including or excluding one or more virtual disks so that you can selectively protect the required data of a virtual machine.
When you configure a backup job for a virtual machine (VM) with its disks included or excluded selectively, you must select the required disks that ensure the subsequent operations such as, Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) enabled restore, VM restore, Instant Recovery (IR), and so on work successfully.

Note: The feature to include or exclude virtual disks when backing up virtual machines was done in Backup Exec 20.4 and later versions..

The following warning message is displayed when you create this backup job.

Notes:

• For file folder GRT and VM-level restore to work, the disk hosting the boot volume needs to be selected in the backup.
• If the virtual machine being backed up has volumes configured using multiple disks, then all disks forming the volume must be selected for the backup.
  For example, RAID 5, spanned volumes, and so on.
• For application GRT (APPGRT), the disks hosting the boot volume and the application data need to be selected in the backup.

For example, An Exchange VM has 4 disks. Disk_1 hosts C:\ volume, Disk_2 hosts D:\ volume, Disk_3 hosts E:\ volume, Disk_4 hosts F:\ volume and Disk_5 hosts G:\ volume.
C:\ is the boot volume.
D:\ hosts the database (*.edb files) and log files (*.log) for Exchange database EXCHDB1
E:\ hosts the database (*.edb files) for Exchange database EXCHDB2.
F:\ hosts the log files (*.log) for Exchange database -EXCHDB2.
In this example, to get APP GRT to work successfully for both the Exchange databases, the backup selections should include Disk_1, Disk_2, Disk_3 and Disk_4
Or
To get APP GRT to work successfully for only the EXCHDB2 database, the backup selections should include Disk_1, Disk_3 and Disk_4

• You do an APP GRT backup of a SQL VM with the SQL database files across various disks and the job has additional settings to run a log backup after the VM backup. All SQL databases are backed up even though the VM backup had only some of the virtual disks selected.

After the Backup Exec server is upgraded from Backup Exec 20.2 or earlier to Backup Exec 20.3 or later

After the Backup Exec server is upgraded to BE 20.3 or later, you can edit a previously created backup solution and modify the selection. That way one or more VMs are selected partially. If the next immediate job to run is of incremental/differential backup type, then based on the job configuration the job may complete a full backup or fail.

• The immediate incremental/differential backup backs up such virtual machines using the FULL backup method, only if the ‘Use the full backup method for virtual machines that do not support incremental or differential backups’ option is selected in the backup job.
• The immediate incremental/differential backup fails if the ‘Use the full backup method for virtual machines that do not support incremental or differential backups’ option is not selected in the backup solution.