Global backup report in Powershell

A lot of partners, try to go that extra step and also manage onsite Veeam backup environments. They mostly want a report with all jobs status from all Veeam backup servers, instead of plowing through 100's of emails sent by multiple backup servers

Enterprise manager allows you to do that. You can add multiple backup servers and it will give you a global overview. However, it also acts like a license manager. So if you have different customers, with different licenses, you can not add them all together in one Enterprise manager.

A way around it would be to create some Restful API integration. That would be the cleanest way to do it in my humble opinion. However if you want to have a quick hack, you can also do it by using Powershell. Just launch a remote session to all those backups servers and collect the data.

Now a lot of people just need a small "sample" script, just to get started. So here is a basic "sample". It is surely not future complete and has very poor error handling. But it can get you started.

So the first part defines the instances. Granted it would be cleaner to take the table, convert it to a csv, and then import it at the beginning of the script. The instances table exists out of objects that define: the customer, the backupserver, the username and then the password in an encrypted form. Not sure how to get the password in an encrypted form? Just use the code at the top to generate what you need. However make sure that the whole password doesn't have any line breaks when you copy past!

Resulting in the pre-created code

After correct copy/pasting and removing line breaks, you should get something like this

If you then run the code, it should connect to all the instances, execute some Veeam PS Code, built a table and then collect it centrally. The end result? A $globaljob table, which you can then use to build a csv report, html report, one big email, etc.. Hope it can be useful to somebody as a starting point!

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

Get even more control over your Veeam schedules

Veeam has a pretty extensive scheduler for jobs. However sometimes customers really want strange schedules to run their backups. I always try to change the mindset. Sometimes they want to have alternating backups just because they don't know the backup copy job exists in v7. In this case, it's like your Santa bringing them a new Christmas present when you explain them that they can actually copy their backups really easily from repository to repository.

However sometimes they have exotic questions. For example we want to run an active full every 2 weeks. Not every week or every month, no every 2 weeks. So what can you do in this case? Well use the Windows task scheduler and some easy Powershell script that executes your logic.

If you want to use Veeam Powershells snapin, make sure you explicitly install it. It is provided as part of the Veeam Backup & Replication installer, but is not selected by default. To validate, just check if you can find the Powershell option in your main menu.

If you don't have it installed, you can fire up the main installer or just locate the corresponding MSI on the iso ":\Backup\BPS_x64.msi"

The most  simple script can be found here:
simplestartjob.ps1

Change the name of the job in the script to match your job you want to start. Then go to the windows task scheduler and make a new task:

Then create a new task. Personally I like to add my Veeam task in a custom folder so that they are all grouped together.

On the general page enable

• "Run whether user is logged on or not"
• "Run with highest privileges" : If you want to know why you need to enable this, find more info at the end of the blog article. If you don't care, go ahead and continue

On the action tab, add a new action

Fill the correct setting

• Program : powershell
• Arguments : "e:\scripts\simplestartjob.ps1"

 Use the quotes to be safe (for examples if you have spaces in your path

The result should be something like this:

Now create a trigger

You can schedule it daily, weekly or monthly

Finally click ok and enter the credentials.

When the script runs it should start your job

Also I created some scripts in the past for customers:

• Activefull.ps1 : Active full which should be run on special time. With the windows task scheduler you can say for example first and third week of the month. Alternatively you can do the alternation in the script itself
• alternate weeks: if( ([int]$(get-date -uformat "%V"))%2 -eq 1) { do_something }
• alternate days: if( ([int]$(get-date -uformat "%j"))%2 -eq 1) { do_something }
• Startjob.ps1 : Launcher script. Instead of making a different script for each job, you can reuse the script and give the job name via a parameter
• Please not that the argument should be something like (single quotes around names). Correct quotes are important "c:\path\to\script\startjob.ps1 'my job name'"
• Stoptapejob  : Stop tape job after a certain time. Customer has a single drive and tape job "hang" if there is no drive in the slots and he was canceling them manually every day.

Why I need to run with highest privileges
Actually if you just open a powershell prompt in non-admin mode and admin mode you will see why

When you run in non-admin mode you will get a SQL error. Actually it is not really about admin mode but more about the fact that the current user doesn't have access to the database. It is actually the same requirement, when you want to give users fine grained access to the GUI. So first of all make sure you setup the correct permissions in B&R itself (Main menu>Users and roles)

Next to that, users also need permissions to the database that is behind B&R

If you give the user db_owner on the Veeam db, it should work as well

Miniblog: Powershell Out-Gridview cmdlet

Normally I'm not so enthusiastic about a simple powershell cmdlet but in this case I wonder why I didn't find it earlier.

With Powershell you will end up with arrays of objects all the time. Visualizing them on the console can be tricky. Worse if you want to select a certain object, you will need to display them and then let the user input some number that corresponds with the object you want to select. Most of the time I will end up with using the in-line where clause to filter out objects but it is not really dynamic.

Until this morning I discovered the out-gridview. This cmdlet will take a stream of objects and show them in a GUI gridview. If you use the -passthru parameter it even allows you to select an object. To give you an example, here is a "Process killer" script in 1 line of code

Get-Process | Out-GridView -passthru -title "Kill me now" | % { Stop-Process $_ }

When you run it a gridview will appear:

 

Then you can select the filter view to filter out for example notepad. If you then select notepad and click ok, it will send the select object(s) down the pipeline where the foreach-object will iterate over the objects and stops the processes