I was wondering if anyone else does this.
When we delete a VM, I often have someone come ask me where it was 6 months to a year later and sometimes there is something unnoticed that is broken.
Due to the amount of storage we use here (PB’s) I tend to not want to keep all these old VM’s powered off, or even on the Veeam SANs as they take up a ton of space for something that most likely isn’t needed.
To resolve this I created a media pool on both tape libraries that has a retention of 2 years. When I power the VM off for the final time I do a Veeam zip, then add it to a file to tape job at both sites.
In the file to tape job I just grab the VBK from the repo and then can remove the Veeam ZIP when it’s done. Even though it’s not 3-2-1 technically the VM’s are requested to be deleted anyways. If I lost them it wouldn’t be critical. Having them on tape is cheap, and people are very happy when they can get their data.
