As I teased in Using vCenter tags with PowerCLI, I want to explore how to use tags  in a practical application. To refresh our memory, we looked at creating an Ownership category with individual tags in it, and limited VMs to having just one of the tags. We created a little script that defines our schema, in case we need to re-create it. We are going to work on a new category today for our backups. Specifically, Veeam backups, based on SDDC6282-SPO, Using vSphere tags for advanced policy-driven data protection as presented at VMworld 2015.

Defining Policy and Tags

To create our backup jobs, we need to know a few things that will translate into our tag schema. Our backup policies are defined by a combination of ownership, recovery point objective (RPO), and the retention period. For example, our Development group is okay with a 24 hour RPO and backups that are retained for a week. Operations may require a 4 or 8 hour RPO and require 30 days of backups. Each of those combinations will require a separate backup job. We can combine these tuples of information into individual tags so that Veeam can make use of them. We also need one more tag for VMs that do not need any backup at all. We can put all of this in a tag category called VeeamPolicy. Here’s what that might look like, again in PowerShell:

New-TagCategory -Name VeeamPolicy -Description "Veeam Backup Policy" -Cardinality Single -EntityType VirtualMachine
New-Tag -Name "NoRPO" -Category VeeamPolicy -Description "This VM has no backups"
New-Tag -Name "Development24h7d" -Category VeeamPolicy -Description "Development VMs with 24 hour RPO, 7 days retention"
New-Tag -Name "Operations8h30d" -Category VeeamPolicy -Description "Operations VM with 8 hour RPO, 30 day retention"
New-Tag -Name "Sales48h30d" -Category VeeamPolicy -Description "Sales VM with 48 hour RPO, 30 day retention"

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I was recently introduced to some practical usage of vCenter tags. I used tags to build a fairly easy and dynamic set of sources for Veeam backup jobs, but before I get into that, I want to explain tags a little bit for those who are not familiar with them.

Tags are something that are pretty easy to understand conceptually. You create a category which contains a few tags. An object can receive one or multiple tags from a given category. Tags are managed by vCenter, not by vSphere, so require a license that provides vCenter for management. That’s a pretty simple explanation and list of requirements.

A Tag Category has a collection of Tags available within it. If the Category is “single cardinality”, it means that an object can only be assigned one tag in the category. This might be good for a category associated with ownership or recovery point objective (RPO). A Category can also be “multiple cardinality”, where a single object can be assigned multiple tags in a category. This would be helpful to associate applications with a VM, or a list of support teams that need notified if there is a planned impact or outage.

I’m going to show you how to manage Tags and Tag Categories with PowerCLI (Specifically with the PowerShell ISE and a profile to load PowerCLI), but you can manually create and manage them through the vSphere Web Client, under the Tags item on the left hand menu. You can create and delete and rename tags and categories there all day long, and you can right click on an object almost anywhere else and select Edit Tags to edit the assigned tags on it. When you view most objects, you’ll see an area in the Summary tab labeled Tags that will display and let you manage assignments.

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