Powershell wrapper for Beta Veeam Explorer for Active Directory

The new Veeam Explorer for Active Directory is cool stuff. I blogged about it earlier, showing how you can use it today. However it also shows that some manual steps have to be taken. Well, if you work as a sales engineer, you got to do these demo's a lot, meaning a lot of repetitive steps.

Then today, something on the Veeam forum inspired me. A guy was trying to start a Windows FLR via Powershell. So I decided to make a small wrapper to start the FLR and automate all those manual steps... well it sorta got "out of hands"..

You can get the wrapper script here. Save it on the backup server. Make sure to unblock the powershell script (go to the files properties, under the general tab, just above the ok button there should be some warning about downloaded content). Also make sure you have the correct executionpolicy setup.

Then create a new shortcut. In this shortcut specify the following parameter

powershell.exe -file "[path\to\script]\start-vbradrestorefromlatestbackup.ps1"

You can notice in the screenshot I added some parameters. This is where things got "out of hands".

-server [server] : auto select a certain vm. If you don't specify it, the wizard should propose you all the possible VM's in the backup files known to your backup & replication instance

-latest : auto select the latest restore point. If you don't specify it, the wizard should propose the available restore points for the VM you selected

 -autodiscovery : try to connect to the production server to learn where the ntds.dit file is stored. By default it is disabled and the wizard will use the default path "c:\windows\ntds\ntds.dit". I felt it was safer not to automatically connect to production. Notice that WinRM should be enabled as the script uses invoke-command to read the registry key on the production server.

-autodiscoveryserver [dns production ad] : give the ip or dns name to connect to, to do the auto discovery. If not specified but autodiscovery is on, the wizard will try to extract the DNS name from the restore point or use the VM name as a DNS name

-askcredentials : ask for credentials to do the autodiscovery. If you don't specify, it will just use invoke-command with your credentials.

-filepath : if you want to manually specify the path to the ntds.dit file (assuming you didn't enable autodiscovery)

-adexplorer : if you didn't installed the explorer on the default path

Once you have the shortcut, you should right click it and make sure to run it is as an administrator

If you want to give it a shiny icon, you can do that in the shortcut settings as well. Change the icon and browse to the explorer path. By default it is under "C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\ActiveDirectoryExplorer\Veeam.ActiveDirectory.Explorer.exe"

Now you should be up and running. Just click your shiny new shortcut. It should launch the wizard and automatically load the ntds.dit file after a FLR into the VEAD.

You will notice the Powershell window will stay open. That is because it is waiting for you to close the VEAD and to automatically stop the FLR so that everything is cleaned up as well