Business view Group Virtual Machines in Categories: wizard or Grouping expression?

When using Business view the typical thing you want to do is categorize you virtual machines by user groups. This is usually done by the Import /Export function under Configuration but it also can be done by grouping expressions. First the Wizard way

Veeam Business View Configuration overview 

Veeam Business View Configuration overview 2

  Veeam Business View Configuration overview

With the group wizard import you can map handmade Categories to Custom attributes (can be found under Administration) from vCenter server.  Let say U have a custom attribute within vCenter that is named management group within this group you may use several options let’s say Sales, Engineering , Support to show additional information about the VM in the Annotations. With the wizard I mount the management group (left side) to Business Units (on the right side).  In the left side you will see all custom attributes from you’re vCenter server so it possible to do several kind of mappings.

Veeam Business View Import Export Wizard

Veeam Business View Import /Export Wizard

When u run the wizard the used options within vCenter regarding the management group are made as a group under the Business Unit. In this example you will get a overview like the picture below.

Veeam Business View configuration Groups

Veeam Business View configuration Groups

When the import works correct the virtual machines will be categorized by their  target (Sales, Engineering  or Support)  you even can do group expressions (according to Veeam support) but in my case this was not functioning  so I made grouping expressions.

To do group expressions the Category where the groups are member of must be of the type Dynamic!

Veeam Business View configuration Groups Type

Business View configuration Groups Type

To map the custom attribute (management group) target say Sales to the sales grouping within Veaam Business view u must use the category Logical and Item CASE

Veeam Business View configuration Group expression

Veeam Business View configuration Group expression

The conditional to use is :

 CASE WHEN CustomAttribute(“Custom attribute”) = “target” THEN “Business View category” else “” END

the expression for our example will look like this the section between { } is optional:

CASE WHEN CustomAttribute(“Management group”) = “Sales” THEN “Sales” {else “”} END

For Hosts and Storage it is best to use the rules option to categorize the items.