Adding AD/OU users to VBO365 via Powershell

For the Veeam fans out there, you must have been living under a rock if you don't know that there is a new backup product for Office 365 (Veeam Backup for Office 365 or short handed VBO365). It allows you to backup mailbox items like mail, calendar items, etc.

While 1.0 is already released, the 1.5 is currently in public beta. One of the cool things it brings is scalability, which a lot of users have been asking for. However it also brings full automation support in the form of a complete Rest API and a complete Powershell module. In this blog post I want to show you the power you get with the new Powershell module.

Quite often I get asked on how to add only a selected amount of users to a job. For example, a company has 4000 mailboxes, but only want to select a certain amount of mailbox for protection in a certain job. This makes even more sense with v1.5 since you can define multiple repositories with a different retention. So maybe for the helpdesk guys, you don't really want to backup to long, but for the managers, you want to keep the mails backed up for 8 years. Handpicking those users per job can be a tedious job.

With the new Powershell Module, you can  automate this task. There is a new cmdlet called "Add-VBOJob" that allows you to define a new job. It takes the following parameters:

• Organization (Get-VBOOrganization)
• Target Repository (Get-VBORepository)
• Mailboxes (Get-VBOOrganizationMailbox)
• Schedule Policy (New-VBOJobSchedulePolicy)
• Name

To see it in action, I made a sample scripts that queries Active Directory and get's all users in a certain OU. Then based on those users, you can make a list of email address that you want to add. Then armed with that list, you can use "Get-VBOOrganizationMailbox" to select the correct mailboxes.

You can find the script here. It should be quite straight forward. Here are some screenshots seeing it in action

Firs of all, the module is in "C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup365\Veeam.Archiver.PowerShell". So you can just execute "import-module 'C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup365\Veeam.Archiver.PowerShell'". However the $installpath trick in this scripts, tries to find out the installation directory even if you did not install VBO365 on the default location.

Now as you can see from the output, it found 3 users in the OU :

• bbols@x.local
• ppeeters@x.local
• tbruyne@x.local

The scripts "builds" the email address list based on the SamAccountName, but of course if you have a different policy, you can change the example. For example, I imagine quite a few companies having something like FirstName.LastName@company.com. Btw if you are wondering, "x.local" isn't a real DNS name, so how does that work with VBO365? Well it seems that 1.5 will also support on premise Exchange and Hybrid Deployments.

After building the email list, the script created the job

If we check the job, you will see those email addresses (mailboxes) where successfully added to the job

Well in this case, it was only 3 users in my test lab, but I can imagine if you need to add 500 users, you will be grateful nothing having to add them one by one. Also, you would be able to do this in a for loop, going over multiple OU's, creating multipes jobs.  Finally if you are going to use this in production once it is GA, I would recommend that you validate that you have the same amount of users in the OU as in the job. In this example, it just simply checks all the mailboxes (Get-VBOOrganizationMailbox) and verifies if the email address associated to a mailbox is in the initial email list. If it is, it is added to the job.