Running Veeam Jobs

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.

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Start-job -name "VeeamBack" -scriptblock {$jobs | Start-VBRJob}