PowerProtect Data Manager 19.11 Virtual Machine User Guide

Creating virtual machine tags in the vSphere Client

Creating virtual machine tags in the vSphere Client is supported by PowerProtect Data Manager with vSphere versions 6.5 and later. Tags enable you to attach metadata to the virtual assets in the vSphere inventory, which makes assets easier to sort and search for when creating a protection policy.

Asset inclusion in a PowerProtect Data Manager protection policy is based on the filtering criteria that you specify when creating a protection rule.

When you create a tag in the vSphere Client, the tag must be assigned to a category in order to group related tags together. When defining a category, you can specify the object types to which the tags will be applied and whether more than one tag in the category can be applied to an object. Within a single rule, you can apply up to 50 rule definitions to tags and categories, as shown in the following example where Category is the category name and Bronze is the tag name:

• Category:Category1,Tag:Bronze1
• Category:Category2,Tag:Bronze2
• Category:Category3,Tag:Bronze3
• ... Category:Category50,Tag:Bronze50

In the above example, category names and tag names that exceed 9 or 7 characters respectively reduce the limit for rule definitions in a single rule to less than 50. When rule definitions exceed the maximum limit, no virtual machines are backed up as part of the group, because no members are associated with the group. As a best practice, keep the number of rule definitions within a single rule to 10 or fewer and, in cases where there are a large number of rule definitions within a single rule, keep the number of characters in category or tag names to 10 or fewer.

To view existing tags for vCenter in the vSphere Client, select Menu > Tags & Custom Attributes, and then select the Tags tab. Click a tag link in the table to view the objects associated with this particular tag.

For PowerProtect Data Manager to include tagged assets in a protection rule based on the tags created for vCenter, you must assign at least one tag to at least one virtual machine. Note that tags associated with containers of virtual machines (for example, a virtual machine folder) are not currently supported for tag associations to assets.