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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