vProtect Guide – VM TAGS

vProtect allows you to use tags to customize interactions and simplify the work of system administrators. A tag works as a label which you can assign to appropriate backup policy and easily organize and manage your system resources. This is useful when there are many objects in the virtualization environment and the administrator would like to concentrate on creating a consistent schedule to backup selected virtual machines or applications.

This short video will show you how to easily create tags and assign policies to virtual machines.

What tags are?

A tag is a label that can be created and assigned to a selected backup policy and to objects existing in a virtualization environment. For example, if you want to tag your virtual machines with backup policies. Now you can easily group virtual machines by adding only one tag when you need it.

Why to use tags?

Using tags allows you to significantly reduce time needed to manage backup processes for virtual machines, applications, databases or files. It also allows you to easily manage multiple objects in a virtual environment and easily group them. As a result, it also allows us to monitor the performance of our backup strategies and detect bottlenecks in backup process – especially in more complex environments.

Tutorial with screens:

Let’s take a look at the process of creating and assigning tags. We’ll do it on the example of oVirt and Red Hat Virtualization, but we can apply the same process to other virtualization supported by vProtect. In this scenario, we see the backup administrator and the VM administrator.

Steps	Example screen
Create policies and assign tags to backup policies in vProtect. Enter: Policies / Auto assignment / Create a TAG based rule.
When we create a tag in vProtect, we can switch to the oVirt console. The tag is visible and available for the virtual machine administrator to choose.
Select the tag you want to assign to a specific virtual machine.
Periodically vProtect synchronizes information from the hypervisor. You can also initiate synchronization manually.
Now we can see that the selected virtual machine is automatically assigned to the selected backup policy.