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  1. Home
  2. NetBackup™ for VMware Administrator's Guide
  3. Configuring backup policies for VMware
  4. Browse for VMware virtual machines
NetBackup™ for VMware Administrator's Guide

Browse for VMware virtual machines

When you configure a NetBackup policy, you can enter the virtual machine's host name manually or browse for and select it from a list.

As an alternative, NetBackup can automatically select virtual machines based on a range of criteria.

See About automatic virtual machine selection.

The following options are available:

  • Enter the VM hostname

    The format of the name depends on your system. It may be the fully qualified name or another name, depending on your network configuration and how the name is defined in the guest OS. If NetBackup cannot find the name you enter, policy validation fails.

    Note:

    The type of name to enter depends on the Primary VM identifier setting on the VMware tab of the policy.

    To enter a name, make sure that Browse virtual machines is not selected.

  • Browse virtual machines

    The virtual machine names that are listed may be derived from a cache file. Use of the cache file is faster than rediscovering the virtual machines on the network if your site has a large number of virtual machines.

    If NetBackup cannot obtain the IP address of the virtual machine, the host name and IP address are displayed as NONE.

    Note that virtual machine host names or display names must be unique within a primary server's policies.

Last update

This column shows the date and time of the most recent cache file that contains the names of virtual machines.

For NetBackup to access the virtual machines, note the following:

  • The NetBackup primary server must have credentials for the VMware vCenter or ESX servers.

  • DNS problems may prevent or slow down discovery of the virtual machines.

  • To limit the search to particular vCenter or ESX servers, you can create a BACKUP registry entry as an exclude list. Excluding unneeded servers can dramatically speed up the search for virtual machines.

  • The browsing time out value must not be set too low.

More Information

Add VMware servers

Changing the browsing timeout for virtual machine discovery

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Restoring data from the backups that excluded the boot disk or data disks

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Limit the VMware servers that NetBackup searches when browsing for virtual machines

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