VM groups are sets of virtual machines that can be included in backup or restore operations. Each hypervisor contains at least one default VM group, which provides protection for any virtual machines that are not included in another VM group.
You can add additional VM groups for a hypervisor as needed. For example, you can put virtual machines in different VM groups so that you can have different backup criteria, service level agreements (SLAs), or schedules for different classes of virtual machines.
VM groups for a hypervisor are displayed on the details page for the hypervisor. You can select a VM group to view summary information, get status, and perform backups and restores.
When you go to Protect > Virtualization from the navigation pane, the VM groups tab shows the complete set of VM groups defined for all hypervisors.
Best Practice
Define VM groups to facilitate management of different classes of VMs. You can identify VMs of a particular class on the hypervisor by using tags (VMware) or notes (Hyper-V), organize VMs by host or datastore, or use other hypervisor-specific attributes to group VMs. In Commvault, you can then define VM groups by selecting higher-level entities such as hosts, or by defining rules to select VMs based on VM metadata. Automatically discovering VMs rather than selecting them explicitly means that backups can automatically identify VMs that are added, removed, or changed after the initial configuration.