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How to manage administrative groups for VMware virtual machines

Manage administrative groups for VMware virtual machines

Updated over 9 months ago

Enterprise Workloads Editions: ✅ Business | ✅ Enterprise | ✅ Elite

Overview

An administrative group is a logical categorization of servers and virtual machines that share similar attributes. Servers can be grouped based on similar attributes like server type, server location, and operating system.

Administrative groups are formed to simplify server management. The following are the reasons why you should form an administrative group in Druva:

  • Easy server administration

  • Monitor the backup activity on servers through a single dashboard

Examples

  • Servers located in one region, for example, US West, can be grouped together

  • Servers having the same operating system can be grouped together

You can select a server from the administrative group page, and perform actions on the server such as adding a backup set, changing the server name or deleting the server.

Best practices

Follow these best practices when you create a new administrative group:

  • Druva can backup data on different server types such as SQL servers, File servers, NAS Shares, Hyper-V virtual machines, and VMware virtual machines. An administrative group can have different types of servers attached to it. However, we recommend that you create different groups for different servers. For example, create a separate administrative group for virtual machines and a different administrative group for servers running MS-SQL.

  • Plan and segregate virtual machines in an administrative group, depending on the criteria you have defined. For example, the location of the virtual machines, or virtual machines with a common guest operating system.

View administrative groups from Manage Administrative Groups

  1. Log in to Druva Cloud Platform Console.

  2. Click

    Global navigation.png

    > Enterprise Workloads > Select the required organization from the All Organizations menu, and then click Manage > Administrative Groups.

  3. The Manage Administrative Groups page displays a list of available administrative groups.

  4. You can click the administrative group for which you want to view details.

  5. The Summary tab of the administrative group details page displays the following fields:

    PBS_AdminGroupSummary.png

Field

Description

Description

The description for the administrative group.

# Resources

The number of servers associated with the administrative group.

Backup Trend

The Backup Trend section displays backup jobs for the last seven days with the following three statuses:

  • Backups successful

  • Backups successful with errors

  • Backups failed

For the detailed explanation of each parameter, see Dashboards.

Backup Data Trend

The Backup Data section illustrates the following data for the last 90 days:

Source + Changes: The amount of backup data generated at the source. This includes the initial full backup and incremental data from all subsequent backups.

Current Source: The size of the data on the source server(s) at the time of the last backup.

The Resources tab of the administrative group details page displays the following fields:

Field

Description

Name

The name of the resource.

Resource Type

The type of resources such as Physical Server, VMware VM, Hyper-V VM, NAS Share, SQL Availability Group, Phoenix Store, and SQL Standalone Instance.

Create a new administrative group from Manage Administrative Groups

Add or create new VMware administrative groups based on your needs to logically categorize virtual machines.

Prerequisites

  • You must be a cloud administrator.

  • You must have created or configured the following,

    • Druva Cloud Storage where the backed up server data should reside. For more information, see Managing storage.

    • A backup policy defining the schedule for backup. For more information, see Configure backup policy.

Procedure

  1. Log in to Druva Cloud Platform Console.

  2. Click

    Global navigation.png

    > Enterprise Workloads > Select the required organization from the All Organizations menu, and then click Manage > Administrative Groups.

  3. ClickNew Group.

    clipboard_e8624d13735384f3dfc91ff3a4b22cfba.png
  4. Enter the name and description of the group and click Save.

  5. The administrative group created now appears on the Manage Administrative Groups page.

Update administrative group details from Manage Administrative Groups

  1. Log in to Druva Cloud Platform Console.

  2. Click

    Global navigation.png

    > Enterprise Workloads > Select the required organization from the All Organizations menu, and then click Manage > Administrative Groups.

  3. The Manage Administrative Groups page displays a list of available administrative groups.

  4. To update an administrative group you can:

    • Select an administrative group and click Edit.
      OR

    • Click on the administrative group and on the Administrative group details page, click Edit.

  5. The Edit Administrative Group dialog box opens. Edit the name and/or description.

  6. Click Save.

​Delete an administrative group

Enterprise Workloads administrators can delete a group if it is no longer needed. However, before deleting a group, the virtual machines belonging to this group should be assigned or moved to a different group.

Virtual machines should be reconfigured to be assigned or moved to a different group. For more information, see Reconfigure virtual machines.

As an administrative group is just a logical entity, deleting a group doesn't affect the virtual machine data anyway.

Before you delete an administrative group, reconfigure and assign all the virtual machines under it to a different group.

Procedure

You can delete an administrative group at any time. However, If a resource is mapped to the group you cannot delete the group.

  1. Log in to Druva Cloud Platform Console.

  2. Click

    Global navigation.png

    > Enterprise Workloads > Select the required organization from the All Organizations menu, and then click Manage > Administrative Groups.

  3. The Manage Administrative Groups page displays a list of available administrative groups.

  4. To delete an administrative group you can:

    • Select an administrative group and click Delete.
      OR

    • Click on the administrative group and on the Administrative group details page, click Delete.

  5. The Delete Administrative Group dialog opens. Edit the name and/or description.

  6. Click Save.

Change the administrative group for configured virtual machines

If you want to regroup virtual machines, Druva lets you change the administrative group for multiple virtual machines.

To change the administrative group:

  1. Log in to the Management Console.

  2. From the top menu bar, select your organization if organizations are enabled.

  3. Click Protect > VMware.

  4. The All vCenter/ESXi host page appears that lists all the registered vCenter/hypervisors.

  5. You can either select the registered vCenter/ESXi host from the card view or list view or select it from the vCenter/ESXi host list in the left navigation pane.

  6. In the navigation pane, click Configured VMs.

  7. Select the virtual machines, and from more options select Change Administrative Group.

  8. From the Change Administrative Group dialog that appears, select a different administrative group and click Save.


📝 Note
To edit the administrative group, click on the virtual machine. On the virtual machines summary page, click the administrative group under the Details section.


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