Step 3a. Choose Resources

First, at the Virtual Machines step of the wizard, specify the backup scope — resources that Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV will back up:

Click Add.
In the Add Objects window, choose whether you want to back up all VMs in the cluster, only specific VMs or protection domains. In the Prism Central deployment, you can also back up VMs and clusters assigned to a specific category or all VMs managed by a Prism Central.

To view the list of available protection domains, click the PDs icon on the toolbar at the top right corner of the window. If you add a protection domain, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV will regularly check for new consistency groups (VMs and volume groups) added to the domain and automatically update the job settings to include these groups in the backup scope. For a protection domain to be displayed in the list of the available domains, it must be configured in the Nutanix AHV cluster as described in Nutanix documentation.

To view the list of available categories, click the Categories icon on the toolbar at the top right corner of the window. If you add a category, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV will regularly check for new VMs and clusters assigned to the category and automatically update the job settings to include these resources in the backup scope. For a category to be displayed in the list of the available categories, it must be configured in the Nutanix AHV Prism Central as described in Nutanix documentation.

Tip

As an alternative to specifying resources explicitly, you can exclude a number of resources from the backup scope. To do that, click Exclusions and specify the VMs or protection domains that you do not want to back up — the procedure is the same as described for including resources in the backup scope.

Consider that if a resource appears both in the list of included and excluded resources, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV will still not process the resource because the list of excluded resources has a higher priority.

While running the job, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV processes resources in the order they are added to the backup scope. However, you can change the order, for example, if you add some mission-critical VMs to the job and want them to be processed first. To change the processing order, select a resource and use the Up or Down buttons.

Note

Consider the following:

If you include a resource into the backup scope for multiple times (for example, an individual VM and a PD that contains this VM), Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV will process this resource only once.

If you include a protection domain, category, cluster or Prism Central into the backup scope, VMs in this object are processed at random. To ensure that the VMs are processed in a specific order, you must add them as standalone VMs — not as a part of the protection domain, category, cluster or Prism Central.

[Applies only to the Prism Central deployment] To instruct Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV to obtain VM data from a replica cluster, select the Backup from Prism Central replica (if available) check box. Using replica clusters help you reduce impact of backup operations on performance of the production environment. If Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV fails to obtain data from a replica cluster, backup will be still performed using VM data obtained from the main cluster.

By default, jobs process all disks and volume groups attached to VMs included into the backup scope. However, you can protect only specific disks and volume groups of the selected resources. For more information, see Step 3b. Choose Disks and Volume Groups.

Step 3a. Choose Resources