Categories: Backup, Replication, Settings, XenServer, Physical Systems, Hyper-V, Alike v3, Alike v4

Introduction

Alike v3 allows you to flexibly specify which VMs should be included in your backup and replication jobs in three ways: By host, by name or by tag.

With any of these new approaches, Alike will detect all the VMs that match your choice before every job runs, ensuring all new VMs matching your selection are included automatically.

1. By Name

By entering a search term and choosing ‘By Name,’ Alike will find all VMs on all of your licensed hosts which contain (case-insensitive) the pattern you enter. For example, the pattern “web” would match all of the following VMs:

WebServer

SRVweb

world wide web server1

2. By Tag

Tag based selection is only available for XenServer systems, and allows you to include all VMs containing a specified tag in your jobs. There are two points to note about tag based selection: it is case sensative (unlike names), and it must be a complete match of the Tag.

For example, the following tags would NOT match the pattern “web”:

Web

WebServers

Web1

3. By Host

By choosing a whole host to protect, Alike will determine all of the VMs running on, or ‘homed’ on that host at the time of job execution, and include them in the job. This provides an easy and maintenance free way to ensure all your new VMs are included in backups, and deleted VMs are removed from jobs.

Final Notes

*Please Note: Unlike the other options (tag and name), selecting by host does allow you at also specifiy other VMs in the job.