Excluding Applications from Application-Aware Backups

By default, VSA application-aware backups configure VMs based on the applications that run on the VMs. You can configure additional settings to modify this behavior.

Application-aware backups can perform the following actions:

Discover all supported applications running on virtual machines and configure all of the corresponding application plug-ins for backups.
Automatically discover and configure all instances of applications such as SQL Server and Oracle.
Automatically update the client or VM to the same service pack that is applied to the VSA proxy.
Automatically create transaction log backup schedules for database applications such as Oracle and SQL Server. The transaction logs are backed up by default to the same storage policy as the data backups.

When these settings are configured, they apply to all VMs that use the same VSA proxy for backups.

Procedure

To modify default settings for remote installations with application-aware backups, add the additional settings shown in the following table to the VSA proxy that is used for application-aware backups.

For instructions on adding additional settings from the CommCell Console, see Add or Modify an Additional Setting.

Additional Setting	Category	Type	Description and Values
SkipInstallAndConfigApplications	iDataAgent\VSA_APP_AWARE	String	Skip automatic installation and configuration of the specified application types during Virtual Server Agent application-aware backups. Set the additional setting to a comma separated list of application types that need to be skipped. For example: To skip SQL Server and Oracle, set the value to SQL,ORACLE. To skip Active Directory, set the value to ACTIVEDIRECTORY. To skip Microsoft Exchange, set the value to EXCHANGE. To skip MySQL, set the value to MYSQL.
SkipInstallUpdates	iDataAgent\VSA_APP_AWARE	Integer	1: Skip automatic service pack updates for discovered VMs or application clients during Virtual Server Agent application-aware backups.
SkipConfigInstances	iDataAgent\VSA_APP_AWARE	String	Skip automatic configuration of application instances. The instance name string can be found from the CommCell Console under the VM client for the application agent. For example, if a VM has two SQL Server instances, Instance1 and Instance2, set the additional setting as follows to skip configuration and application-aware backups of Instance2: `VSA_APP_AWARE\SkipConfigInstances - "Instance2"` You can enter multiple instances as comma-separated values.
SkipStoragePolicyAssocForTLBackup	iDataAgent\VSA_APP_AWARE	Integer	1: Skip association of log backups to a storage policy. Important Configure this additional setting only after the first VSA application-aware backup is successfully run for a VM. If this setting is added before any VSA application-aware backups for a VM have run successfully, then storage policy association for transaction log backups is skipped and transaction log backups might fail. This additional setting can be used in cases where the user wants to associate transaction log backups with a storage policy of their choice.