From my experience, most organizations leverage tags to organize their backup jobs.
But here’s the tricky question: How are these tags managed?
Do you tag during deployment? When the business requests it? Based on applications or SLAs? Or do you sometimes forget to tag workloads?
There might be a better way:
Let Veeam ONE handle the heavy lifting for you.
What are we going to do?
- Reduce operational overhead by dynamically adding or removing VMs from jobs
- Use Veeam ONE to automate vSphere tags
- Target workloads with db or sql in their names
- Exclude replicas of those VMs
- Create a backup job targeting the newly created tag
Requirements
Veeam ONE needs permission to create tags.
For this, the Business View must not rely on external sources—Veeam ONE will act as the managing component.
Navigate to Server Settings → Business View and disable synchronization with external sources.
Categorization & Conditions
In my example, I have multiple database systems. The common denominator? They include db or sql in their names (conditions are not case-sensitive).
Since these workloads are critical, they also have replicas; which we don’t need in our backup job. So, we’ll exclude them.
I’ll add a category and configure it as follows:
Important: Conditions default to AND. My VMs use either db or sql, so I’ll link them with OR.
I want Veeam ONE to create vSphere tags, so:
After Veeam ONE ran a data collection job these Tags are created in vSphere:
VBR Job
Finally I can create my VBR Job and target the newly created tag. All VMs with that specific tag will be automatically processed with that job.
Summary & Thoughts
- With Veeam ONE, it’s easy to automate backup jobs and dynamically assign tags to VMs
- This reduces operational overhead, keeps you aligned with SLAs, and ensures new workloads are never missed
- This example uses VM names, but other use cases could include combined tagging based on:
- Datastores
- Clusters
- Existing tags
- Power state
- OS
- Backup status
- Size
- Snapshot age or creation time
- IP address
Additional ideas:
- Identify workloads without backups and create a catch-all job
- Group workloads by storage/storage snapshot integration
- Group workloads by business units & SLAs
So go ahead—automate your backup jobs!
