As many know I am a big fan of VRO, I mean how can you not be? Orchestrated DR with automated testing and built in reporting. What is not to like about that?
Something I have struggled with though is Groups in plans. By default, systems are grouped based on Veeam BNR jobs or vSphere datastores. What does this mean? Well, if I have 20 VMs in a backup job, those 20 come into VRO in a group based on that backup job. I can add this group to a recovery plan to be restored into another vSphere environment or a cloud recovery plan to Azure. But what if I want to recover 10 to another vSphere location and 10 to Azure? I could break the job in half so that I get 2 groups based on new backup jobs with 10 each. However, that may not be practical for my retention requirements, or just more administrative overhead.
So how can we solve this problem? Glad you asked. Since VRO relies on the embedded VeeamOne, we can use vSphere tags or Business View Categories to group systems together. Let’s look at how to set this up and what it looks like in VRO. I am not going to cover how to set up vSphere tags (hopefully if you are reading this you know how to do that ).
Start by logging into the Veeam One client on the Orchestrator server. Select Business View in the lower left window, then select Categories in the middle window.
Name the Category and select the Category Type
Choose your category method
Under Single parameter, you can use any of the following:
There are a lot more options under Multiple conditions and more logic operator and value options. This is like If statements in programing.
In this example, I am looking for a Tag with VRO-Recovery AND Has Backups Yes
By default, multiple conditions use the AND logic. This can be changed by selecting them with the Checkbox and clicking the Link button.
Then you can change to an OR link
Then you can setup notifications for the group if you wish.
Once you have created the Category, we need to force a collection in order to see the results.To do this, log into the Veeam One Web portal. This can be accessed by going to https://orchestrator-server:1239
Once logged in, go to Data Collection and click Start
After the collection runs, go back to the Veeam One client on the Orchestrator server, under Business View, select your Category and verify that the VMs you expected are listed in the category.
Once we have the correct VMs in the category, go over to Orchestrator web portal. After login, click the Inventory tab and you should see your Category in the Groups list. Select it and you will see the VMs under the Group members section.
Now you can add that Group to your Plan.
