Creating a VM Group for Azure Stack Hub

You can create a VM group to identify a specific set of Azure Stack Hub VMs to back up or restore.

Procedure

From the Command Center navigation pane, go to Protect > Virtualization.

The Virtual machines page appears.
In the upper-right area of the page, click Add VM group.

The Select Hypervisor page of the Add VM Group configuration wizard appears.
From the Hypervisor list, select the hypervisor to create a VM group for.
Click Next.

The Plan page of the Add VM Group configuration wizard appears.
For Plan, select an existing plan or create a new plan.
Steps to create a plan
1. Click the add button .
  
  The Add plan dialog box appears.
2. In the Plan name box, enter a descriptive name for the plan.
3. For Storage, select the storage pool where you want to store backups.
4. For the plan settings, select pre-defined settings or create custom settings:
  - To select pre-defined settings, under Retention rules, select one of the following:
    - Select Standard retention to retain the incremental backups for 1 month.
    - Select Extended retention for optimized storage where the incremental backups of primary and secondary copies are retained for 1 month, and extended retention for monthly and yearly full backups.
      
      Note
      
      The Extended retention option is available only when the secondary copy backup is selected.
  - To create custom settings, select Custom plan, and then specify the following:
    - For Retention, specify the amount of time to retain the backups.
    - For Backups run every, specify how often to run backups.
5. Click Done.
The Add VM Group page of the Add VM Group configuration wizard appears.
In Name, enter a descriptive name for the VM group.
To create rules that auto-discover and select VMs to back up, do the following:
1. Click Add, and then select Rules.
  
  The Add rule dialog box appears.
2. From the list, select the type of rule to create, and then specify the rule:
  - Browse: Select specific VMs. (Selecting this option changes the Add rule dialog box to the Add content dialog box.)
  - Locations: Select VMs based on the location they are in.
  - Power state: Select VMs based on whether they are powered on or off.
  - Resource group: Select VMs based on the resource group they are in.
  - Storage account: Select VMs based on the storage account they are in.
  - Virtual machine name or pattern: Select VMs based on their names. For example, to select VMs that have a name that includes "east", enter Virtual machine name or pattern | Contains | east.
3. Click Save.
To select VMs in other ways, do the following:
1. Click Add, and then select Content.
  
  The Add content dialog box appears.
2. From the Browse and select VMs list, select one of the following:
  - Regions: Select an Azure region to include all VMs in the region.
  - Resource group: Select a resource group for Azure Resource Manager.
  - Storage accounts: Select a storage account to include all VMs that are in the storage account.
  - VMs: Select specific VMs.
3. Click Save.
To see the VMs that are selected for the VM group, click the Preview button.
To use IntelliSnap to back up the VM group, move the IntelliSnap toggle key to the right.

When you enable IntelliSnap for a VM group, the associated server plan is automatically updated to have the Snap enabled option selected.
Click Submit.