Add delay during failover plan

[rmiller]

I have a failover plan that runs a test every Thursday. Everything seems to run fine, except that there are always a couple warnings - either related to Veeam not getting the replica IP address, or the ping test comes back grey. Each iteration, it happens to different machines, and there is not real consistency. It seems like it's a matter of VMware simply needing more time for VMtools to do its thing so that Veeam can run the test successfully.

Is there built-in way of adding some sort of delay during process steps? Or is it common to simply increase the # of retries until enough time has passed that the test can succeed?

Thanks.

[ssimakov]

There is no built-in way to introduce delay but it's easily achievable with the custom steps that will execute PowerShell Start-Sleep cmdlet or use similar method to proceed after timeout. You can find an example here: https://github.com/stnsmk/veeam-vao-ste ... /Delay.ps1.

[Alec King]

Hi Ryan,
The best way is to add more retries - this method optimises the overall execution time of the plan. Rather than a fixed delay (which might or might not be required), retries mean the plan will proceed to the next step in the shortest possible time.

One small disadvantage of retries is that it can make the reports more verbose - we're looking at ways to optimise that too.

And of course, VAO has ultimate flexibility So, although we don't have a built-in 'Delay' step, just create a custom script step that simply runs Sleep in powershell. You could pass in the duration as a parameter. And of course you could set this custom step to execute only in test mode - not in a real failover.

Hope that helps!

[haslund]

What is the benefit of adding artificial delays? It just means everything gets delayed when the process could have already moved onto the next plan step. If something sometimes takes more time, which obviously will happen both during testing and real failovers, then the retries will catch this every single time. Alternatively, just increase the timeout for some these steps.