A few posts back I described how you can document your Veeam backup job settings. This gives a great overview, especially if you have many jobs to keep track of. As I mentioned, I had found a few inconsistencies across jobs and in this post I’ll show how to update all jobs via a small script. You can imagine the time saved by not having to open each and every job, check the settings and update if needed.
A few months back I came across this article from Luca Dell’Oca – Check multiple job settings in Veeam Backup & Replication with Powershell. As he describes, this is a great way to get a good view of your backup jobs. When you have a few hands in the mix, over time with lots of jobs, human error is going to happen. A missed check box here, incorrect setting there. You’ll be surprised what you may find the first time you look. So I decided to finally take his advice and create a quick report that dumps the job details to a csv file.
Find the latest version here.
Here’s another case of taking a script that someone has shared and putting your personal tweaks into it.
If there was an area in which I wish Veeam would improve, it would be reporting. Though their answer is VeeamOne, it’s a bit much if you just want the additional backup reports. Fortunately this can be overcome with some creative Powershell. I started with a report called vPowerCLI v6 Army Report which can be found here. I had used this report for quite a while until v7 came along and broke a few items. I decided to take the opportunity to not only fix the issues (where I could) but also add some information to the report. I had also been looking at the SAMReports found here and decided to combine a few bits. Lastly, Tom Sightler had a post here that added the ability to report back VMs that had not been backed up within the given time frame – very nice. I can’t say enough about the original authors, without which, I never could have come up with such a report in the end.
This is something that has bugged me for a while. Though I absolutely love what Veeam brings to the table as far as a backup product is concerned, one issue I have observed in a (fairly) large environment was with the default log file location – you guessed it – C:\ProgramData\Veeam\Backup
There were times when I’ve witnessed over 40GB of log files filling up the C: drive. It becomes a chore to keep an eye on it and weed them down when needed. Though there were previously options to reduce the amount of log files kept, we have needed them for support purposes in the past so I was reluctant to trim them to tight.
Find the latest version here.
One of the best things about Powershell and the community is the ability to easily find what others have done and improve upon it or tweak it for your own needs. This was the case with a script I found in the Veeam forums a few months back to backup a single VM using Powershell. It worked great (with a minor issue described below) but unfortunately was broken after upgrading to v7. I was able to identify the issues causing it to fail but was not able to rectify them all. Back to the forums I went and with a little help from the folks at Veeam we were back in business.