HPE backup policies in place with no rules

[prezidentj33]

We currently have backup policies in place that do not have any rules however are working based off of what I can see from searching backups for vm's. I only see a few backup policies with rules. We have 3 vcenter portals however I can see all of them from one of them. Looking at backup policies doesn't appear any different when viewing one or the other. 

My question is that I thought you needed rules on a backup policy to function? If so, how do I see what is being used for backup policies with no rules assigned?

Thank you!

[prezidentj33]

To clarify things a bit, we have HPE Simplivity Plug-in for VSphere Web Client 13.33.3 in our web vsphere portal.  There are about 15 Backup Policies setup and 4 of them have rules associated. Even ones that do not have rules associated to them, are applied to some virtual machines. If I right click on one of those Virtual machines (a backup policy that does not have any associated rules) and choose All HPE Simplivity Actions and do Search Backups I can see backups for that VM. 

When creating a backup policy it informs you you need a rule to have any automated backups. These backups i'm seeing are definately automated. The issue is, I do not know how to tell where or how they are working with no rules. Datastore's do not appear to have any policies applied. Unless i'm not looking in the right location?

[JohnHHaines]

You can create an empty backup policy - that is, a policy with no rules. That policy will create no backups. The prupose of this is to have a policy you can apply to VMs (test vms, for example) that you DON"T want backup up.

It is not possible to create a datastore without a backup policy associated with it, so you might be looking in the wrong place.

Backup policies are global to the Federation, so it should not matter wheer you are looking at them from, but the plug-in should be installed on every vCenter, and they should be in linked mode.

Backups of the VMs may exist because they were manual backups, or the policy was changed at some point.

Note that if you change (i.e., change it from one policy to another) the default policy of a datstore, that will NOT change the backup policy of any existing VMs. However, if you modify an existing policy (by adding or modifying rules), that will affect all existing VMs with that policy applied.

You should plan out the backups you want (daily, weekly, etc) and retention period, and add in the appropriate rules to do this for the existing policies.

[prezidentj33]

Hello John,

I deeply apologize for not catching this reply. I must have missed it in slews of emails and things were busy and I got off track. But, now that I see your response I have a few questions. 

I am viewing backup policies in HPE Simplivity Federation (we have 3 Vcenters linked).  I'll take one I see in here for example. We'll call it production_repl_2day.  I can see 7 or 8 vm's have the policy attached to them by looking in related objects of that backup policy.  To verify something is or isn't happening I went to one of those VM's to check backups. I right click on the VM and choose "All HPE Simplivity Actions->Search Backups". When I look at this it looks like there is 2 backups on each of our main Clusters. each with a 24hr retention.  looks like it's holding a backup for 24hrs for 2 days on each cluster and then just rinse/repeat. Is this the default function of a backup policy if there are no rules set? I guess that is my next question. When you create a policy and it doesn't have any rules or it's using the default datastore backup policy, where can I see what that is?

Thank you!

[JohnHHaines]

No worries.

No, this is not a default setting. The defaults, when you create a rule, are Backup 1/hour, and Retain for 1 day, so someone must have changed this.

To see the backup policy the VM is using, in vCenter, click on <Home>, and select HPE SimpliVity Federation; then click on Virtual Machines. This will show you which Policy the VMs are using.

From there, you can <right-click> on a VM and choose All SimpliVity Actions; Edit Backup Policy to view or change the rules in the policy.

Choose the frequency and retention policy that you need.

Bear in mind, that you should do some sort of "roll up" of backups. There is a limit (although very large) to the number of backups the system can track, and you want to make life easier for yourself by limiting the number of backups you need to search through to find things for end users.

For example:

- take a daily backup, keep for one week

- take a weekly backup (Frequency 1/day; Advanced, Days of the Week, select one day of the week), keep for one month

- take a monthly backup, keep for 6 months or a year  (Frequency 1/day; Advanced, Days of the month, select "last day").

[prezidentj33]

Thank you for replying so quickly! Actually what you are saying looks to be correct. It is backing up the vm 2 times for 2 days. So, backup vm for 24hrs on local storage and then replicate it to the other cluster and keep for 24rs. It then has the same thing done for another day and then from there it will rinse repeat. So, it's keeping 2 copies of the VM on one cluster and then 2 copies on another cluster/datastore for 24hrs so you essentially have 2 days of backups with a copy residing on each datastore. 

If I edit it's backup policy I just see the backup policy name and no rules exist. 

If this is how the default rule works for new policies then it is working as expected. I guess this explains it's behavior. If I don't add rules to a policy it will just use the default rule applied to all the policies created? Am I on the right track?

Thanks!

[prezidentj33]

Hi John, 

I realize it's been a while on this question/discussion but I have since revisited this and now that I know a little bit more about things maybe I can make more sense here. 

I was reviewing backups for VM's in simplivity so I can make sure our backup policies and rules were set for things we wanted to backup. Our Datastores do have a default policy on them but they don't have any rules so my assumption is that those aren't being backed up. I did look at a few that have that backup policy called "Fixed Default Backup Policy" which is applied to the datastore. 

However, I do find some Vm's with X policy assigned to them with no rules but seem to be following the backup policy we have on some other VM's that are backing up to our other datastore and have 4 rules applied to the policy. This is where I am deeply confused. I have no idea how the other VM's are creating backups when there are no rules applied to the backup policy it's using.  I did verify it is working as I recently added 4 VM's to use that policy and they are creating backups. 1 on their native Datastore cluster and another on our other Datastore cluster.  No clue how that is possible. 

I may have to get someone to remote in and check this out because i'm really confused. Any help on where to look to verify how this is happening?