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Veritas NetBackup™ for VMware Administrator's Guide

Last Published: 2018-02-16

Product(s): NetBackup (8.1.1)

Exclude Disks tab

In the Change Policy dialog box, the Exclude Disks tab appears for policies of the VMware policy type. These options determine the kind of disks on the virtual machine that are excluded from the backup. These options can reduce the size of the backup, but should be used with care. These options are intended only for the virtual machines that have multiple virtual disks.

The following options appear on the Exclude Disks tab.

Table: Options on the Exclude Disks tab of the policy

Option	Description
No disks excluded	Backs up all virtual disks that are configured for the virtual machine.
Exclude boot disk	The virtual machine's boot disk (for example the C drive) is not included in the backup. Any other disks (such as D) are backed up. Consider this option if you have another means of recreating the boot disk, such as a virtual machine template for boot drives. See About the exclude disk options for virtual disk selection. Note: A virtual machine that is restored from this backup cannot start. Data files are available in the restored data disks.
Exclude all data disks	The virtual machine's data disks (for example the D drive) are not included in the backup for this policy. Only the boot disk is backed up. Consider this option only if you have a different policy that backs up the data disks. See About the exclude disk options for virtual disk selection. Note: When the virtual machine is restored from the backup, the virtual machine data for the data disk may be missing or incomplete.
Perform custom attribute based exclusion	Exclude disks by a VMware Custom Attribute that is applied to a virtual machine. The VMware Custom Attribute identifies the disks that you want to exclude from backups. If you select this option, also enter the name of the Custom Attribute. NetBackup then excludes the disks that are defined in that attribute. The attribute must have comma separated values of device controllers for the disks to be excluded. For example: scsi0-0,ide0-0,sata0-0,nvme0-0 The default value is NB_DISK_EXCLUDE_LIST. You can use this value as the custom attribute or choose your own value. Note: Custom Attribute based disk exclusion requires that you enter in NetBackup the credentials for the vCenter server or servers that host the VMs. ESXi server credentials are not sufficient. See Adding NetBackup credentials for VMware. Your VMware administrator must use a VMware interface to apply the custom attribute to the disks that you want to exclude from the virtual server. The Virtual Disk Exclusion Wizard of the NetBackup plug-in for VMware vSphere Web Client provides a method to add a Custom Attribute to a virtual machine or virtual machines. For more information, see the NetBackup Plug-in for VMware vSphere Web Client Guide available through the following URL: http://www.veritas.com/docs/DOC5332
Specific disks to be excluded	Exclude a specific disk by selecting the disk controller type and device numbers that represent the virtual device node of the disk. Then click Add. NetBackup adds the controller ID to the list of nodes to be excluded. Repeat for each disk that you want to exclude. To delete a disk from the list of disks to exclude, select the disk controller type and device numbers, and then click Delete. The list is a comma-separated collection of controller IDs. Alternatively, you can add or delete specific disks by editing the contents of the text box in which the excluded disks appear. Wildcard characters are not supported.

Note:

NetBackup does not support the exclude disks options for Replication Director backups.

For more information about VMware, see the NetBackup for VMware Guide.

More Information

Exclude disks from backups: an example to avoid

Restoring data from the backups that excluded the boot disk or data disks