Selecting VM's to backup using another way

[skentzle]

I'm currently searching for any intelligent way to generate a list of VM's to backup without editing the options file for data mover node. All the option currently supported don't reflect my needs. In our environment the names of the virtual guests up to 40 characters. The vcenter plugin of TDP VE uses the option string for scheduling (this is probably limited to 256 chars). VMFolder option isn't usable to me because of nested folders.
It would be nice to generate a list using PowerCli depending on several conditions like operating system, annotations, etc.
Does anybody have a solution or another idea to solve this?
Thank you for your help.

[moon-buddy]

The only way I could think of is generating a new OPT file from a script wherein the new VM's or deleted VM's are reflected prior to running a VM backup.

This is something easily done with UNIX and maybe a bit of a challenge on DOS/Windows using plain DOS scripting or even Power Shell scripting.

[dsvc]

I'm using the VMFolder option with nested folders. Doesn't matter how far in they are as long as they have a unique name.

You can specify folder3a in this case.

Folder1
|Folder2
|Folder3
|Folder3a
|Folder4