It’s hard to believe that it has been two years since I posted my first version of My Veeam Report. It’s amazing how times flies and interesting to see the progress that has been made. I am extremely grateful for all the feedback provided by folks who see the benefit of running such a report. The feedback has certainly pushed me to improve the report over time – please, keep it coming!
This update includes three major enhancements as well as a few smaller tweaks and polish. The two improvements I think will most benefit folks are the ability to query the Veeam database for repository info as well as the addition of Endpoint backup sessions. The last new addition is reporting for Restore sessions (not sure why this one slipped by for so long).
Lets start with the repository info. If you have been following along, this has historically been a challenge as Veeam does not expose this info via their PowerShell snapin. So we have had to be creative when querying storage for things like total space, free space, etc. With some help from tsightler on the Veeam forums we can now query the Veeam database directly – so we can see what Veeam see’s. That’s the good news. The not so good news is that this will come with some potential issues. One issue is that this method is absolutely not supported by Veeam (no vendor likes you digging into their db directly). This means that they could easily break this function with a patch or update. The other issue is that we need to ensure a connection to the database which could be configured in many different ways (local, remote, etc). The script is setup to use Windows authentication of the user running the script which should cover the majority of use cases. Unfortunately I am not going to be able to troubleshoot individual configurations, so this is going to be a bit of an advanced setup. You can still choose to use the old way if you can’t seem to get the SQL connection to work (by default the old way is used unless specified in the User Variables section).
Next we have Endpoint backups – I surely hope by now you have looked into this awesome addition to the Veeam family. Using a Veeam repository for your Endpoint backups has many advantages and allows us to grab session information with PowerShell as well. Though the information provided is much more basic than what we can retrieve for VM backups, it is still a nice way to keep tabs on these new jobs. I’m hoping Veeam will expand on the information provided in the future (maybe v9?).
Lastly – Restore sessions. It is always a good idea to keep tabs on when Restore sessions are run, especially if you work in an environment where multiple people have access to the VBR server. I’ve added a section for completed as well as running Restore sessions.
I’d like to note as well that through some clean-up I can assure you that Backup Copy jobs and Replica jobs are not included in this version. Some Backup Copy jobs ended up in previous versions, mostly due to my oversight, not purposely. The reason is simple – I don’t happen to use either of these types of jobs. This makes it very hard to ensure the code is correct – the last thing I want to do is report incorrect/unverified data. As mentioned, the code has been cleaned up a bit and this info could be included. I will have to see if I have the time in the future to setup some test jobs and add them to the report. Let me know if this is something that you would really like to see. I’ll also add that this report is for VMware only – no Hyper-V support. Though the same details should be able to be retrieved for a Hyper-V setup…I don’t run Hyper-V…making it too difficult of a task to ensure the report is correct. Though I’m unable to provide a report that is going to work for every possible scenario, I’m happy to share what I have put together for my own use.
As before, be sure to give the user variables section a good once over as there have been a few changes and many additions. By default most things are turned on so on first run you can get a look at everything – feel free to trim back and customize for your needs. There are a few items that you must specify prior to running like the vCenter name (as seen in VBR), the paths to the two Veeam files and the email section (if you want to send a copy of the report via email).
Here’s a list of the included changes:
- Misc minor tweaks/cleanup
- Proxy host IP info now always returns IPv4 address
- Added ability to query Veeam database for Repository size info
- Added report section – Backup Job Status
- Added option to show detailed Backup Job/Session information (Avg Speed, Total(GB), Processed(GB), Read(GB), Transferred(GB))
- Added report section – Running VM Restore Sessions
- Added report section – Completed VM Restore Sessions
- Added report section – Endpoint Backup Results Summary
- Added report section – Endpoint Backup Job Status
- Added report section – Running Endpoint Backup Jobs
- Added report section – Endpoint Backup Jobs/Sessions with Warnings or Failures
- Added report section – Successful Endpoint Backup Jobs/Sessions
Here’s a list of the requirements:
- Veeam v8 (with latest update)
- PowerShell v2
- VMware Infrastructure hosting VMs
Script can be downloaded from here.