Category: Automation

If you want to change the amount of restore points and the deleted VMs retention period, you can do this for your backup jobs by hand. But if you need to change a lot of Veeam Backup & Replication Jobs like I needed to do. You can find these settings in the Backup Job properties:

If you’re a reader of my blog, you know I like to automate this kind of jobs with Powershell. So I created a function to perform this change for me.

The function:

#requires -pssnapin VeeamPSSnapIn
Function Change-RestorePoints{
<#
.SYNOPSIS
    Change the Backup restore points and deleted VMs retention period
.DESCRIPTION

.NOTES
    Authors: Arne Fokkema
.PARAMETER JobName
    A Backup Job in Veeam Backup & Replication
.PARAMETER RetainDays
    The amount of restore points
.PARAMETER RetainCycles
    The amount of days for Deleted VMs retention period    
.EXAMPLE
    PS> Change-RestorePoints -JobName "Job-01" -RetainDays "21" -RetainCycles "21"
#>
    param(
        [parameter(valuefrompipeline = $true,
            position = 0,
            Mandatory = $true,
            HelpMessage = "Enter a Veeam B&R JobName")]
            $JobName,
        [parameter(valuefrompipeline = $true,
            position = 0,
            Mandatory = $true,
            HelpMessage = "Enter the amount of restore points to keep on disk")]
            $RetainDays,
        [parameter(valuefrompipeline = $true,
            position = 0,
            Mandatory = $true,
            HelpMessage = "Enter a deleted VMs retention period in days")]
            $RetainCycles
    )

    begin{
        $vbrjob = Get-VBRJob  | where {$_.Name -eq $JobName} 
    }
    
    process{
        $options = $vbrjob.GetOptions()
        $options.RetainDays = $RetainDays
        $options.RetainCycles = $RetainCycles
        Write-Host "Changing RetainDays: $($RetainDays) and RetainDays: $($RetainCycles) for job: $($vbrjob.Name)"
        $vbrjob.SetOptions($options)
    }
}

To change a particular job on a Veeam Backup & Replication server you can use the following one-liner:

Change-RestorePoints -JobName "Job-01" -RetainDays "30" -RetainCycles "30"

To change all the jobs on a particular Veeam Backup & Replication Server you can use the following foreach loop:

foreach($job in (Get-VBRJob | Sort Name)){
    Change-RestorePoints -JobName $job.Name -RetainDays "14" -RetainCycles "14"
}

The output will look like this:

Today just a quick post about how Powershell can help you change the VM attribute option in Veeam Backup & Replication. Imaging that you have 20 backup jobs and you want or need to change the VM attribute settings. You can do this for every job with 10 mouse clicks or you can do it in five seconds by running the script from this post.

This is the setting I am talking about from the GUI:

When you change the “Notes” value to some custom field in you environment, the script will apply this setting for you.

if((Get-PSSnapin -Name VeeamPSSnapIn -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue) -eq $null){
    Add-PSSnapin "VeeamPSSnapIn"
}

$vbrserver = Get-VBRServer | Where {$_.Type -eq "VC"}
Foreach($vbrjob in (Get-VBRJob)){    
    $options = $vbrjob.GetOptions()
    $options.VmAttributeName = "Notes"
    $options.SetResultsToVmNotes = $true
    $vbrjob.SetOptions($options)
}

The first three lines of code checked if the VeeamPSSnapIn is loaded, if this is not the case it will be loaded via the Add-PSSnapin.

• The backup options will be loaded via the .GetOptions() method.
• VmAttibuteName is the value which you normally enter in the attribute field.
• SetResultsToVmNotes is the checkbox to enable this setting.
• via .SetOptions() method you can apply the new settings.