Veritas NetBackup™ for VMware Administrator's Guide

Best practices for VMware tag usage

The combination of Category and Tag uniquely identifies a tag association to a virtual machine. Veritas, however, does not support selection of virtual machines based on Category. As such, avoid the creation of tags with identical names in different Categories.

When you create a VMware Intelligent Policy and select virtual machines based on tags, identical tag names in different categories may have unintended consequences. All virtual machines with the tag name are selected independent of the Category. Be aware of this behavior as you create your VMware Intelligent Policies.

Because tag queries require Java, consider the use of master servers and media servers as discovery host, as Java is installed by default. Windows clients that are used as a discovery host require a separate installation of the Remote Console.

NetBackup support for VMware tags begins at vCenter 6.0. In a mixed vCenter Server environment (e.g. 5.x and 6.0), a VMware Intelligent Policy query that uses the Tag keyword can return some virtual machines as Failed if the configuration of the query requires tag evaluation on a 5.x vCenter. This behavior is observed when you select Test Query during policy configuration. This behavior is also observed when you run the policy. The parent (discovery) job exits with a non-zero status and its details enumerate the virtual machines that Failed. The virtual machines that the query has included are backed up normally.

You can use any of the options that are shown to create a query that uses tags but does not report virtual machines on 5.x servers as Failed.

Place the tag clause toward the end of the VMware Intelligent Policy query. This configuration allows NetBackup to eliminate as many virtual machines as possible before it evaluates the tag portion of the query. This organization optimizes the performance of discovery and selection of virtual machines.

Consider the query: Powerstate Equal poweredOn AND Tag Equal "Production"

In the example, the first clause automatically eliminates all virtual machines that are poweredOff. The query does not need to evaluate the tag clause of the query for all of those virtual machines.

Tag associations are part of the metadata of the virtual machine. NetBackup considers virtual machine tag association protection a best effort backup. Any tag collection errors are shown in the Activity Monitor for the virtual machine snapshot job.