I’m still fighting hardware issues with my ESX box (among other things) but I wanted to jot down some more notes on my experiences with PowerCLI and the Veeam backup cmdlets. Last week I wrote about how I created multiple backup jobs with a one line PowerShell expression. After the jobs were created I needed to run them. For performance purposes I only wanted to run one at a time but I obviously wasn’t going to sit up all night staring at a computer screen.
My answer was to use Veeam’s Start-VBRJob cmdlet. The cmdlet takes a job name as a parameter, which you can pipe to it. All I needed was a collection of job names. I created an empty array, $jobs and then added one job that I knew I still needed for a VM on another datastore. The other new jobs were for VMs on datastore2. Using Get-VBRJob I retrieved all my Veeam jobs, piped them to Where-Object to filter out all jobs except those where the TargetDir property was G:\Datastore2, since I had all my datastore2 jobs backing up to the same location. For each matching backup job, I added the job name to the $jobs array.
PS C:\> $jobs=@()
PS C:\> $jobs+="MyCompany Exchange 2007"
PS C:\> Get-VBRJob | where {$_.targetdir -eq "g:\datastore2"} | foreach {$jobs+=$_.name}
PS C:\> $jobs
MyCompany Exchange 2007
MyCompany Windows 7
R2 Core RODC
MyCompany Vista
MyCompany XP
MyCompany2003
Research Member Server R2
PS C:\>
Now that I had a collection of jobs, all that was left was to pipe it to Start-VBRJob.
PS C:\> $jobs | Start-VBRJob
The jobs run synchronously and you won’t get your PowerShell prompt back until all the jobs have finished which could be several hours. I was going to let it run overnight so it didn’t matter. But next time I would use a PowerShell job and let this run in the background.
Start-job -name "VeeamBack" -scriptblock {$jobs | Start-VBRJob}
