Jobs and Job Control for VM-Centric Operations

After initial backups for a hypervisor that supports VM-centric operations, you can perform operations either for a VM group or for an individual VM.

When you request an operation for a VM group, the resulting job for the VM group appears in the Jobs list with "VM Admin" as the job type, and a separate child job runs for each VM in the group.

• If one or more child jobs fail, the parent job status is Completed with Errors.

• If all child jobs fail, the parent job status is Failed.

A VM Admin job is used to coordinate the individual operations for each VM in the VM group, but the actual backup data is associated with each child job rather than the VM Admin job. VM Admin (synthetic full) jobs do not appear in the Job Controller, and you cannot create alerts based on them. These jobs are created only to report job status, and they appear only in the job history and some reports.

If a VM is already being backed up as part of a parent job and a backup is requested for the same VM, you can configure the software to queue the new job until the previous job completes. In the CommCell Console Control Panel > Job Management > General tab, select Queue jobs if other conflicting jobs are active.

If a backup is completed for some VMs as part of a parent job, and a scheduled backup begins for VMs that are already completed in the parent job, the new jobs run in parallel with the previously running parent job.

The following job types are shown for VM groups and for each individual VM:

Displaying Child Jobs

When you request a backup job for a VM group or an individual job, a message appears to indicate that the backup job was submitted. In that message, you can click View job details to display the information for the parent backup job or, from the navigation pane, you can click Jobs to view all active jobs. By default, only parent jobs are displayed for virtual machine backups.

From the parent job, as the VMs that are part of the job are identified, the VM list tab at the bottom of the job details page displays information for each VM child job.