[Feature Request] Configure Days for GFS Daily Backups

[smeadors]

I would like to configure the days-of-week for GFS daily tape jobs

My organization is a Monday-Friday 8-5 Shop. We have two independent tape drives without auto-loaders. We are required to archive data for a number of years, so tape GFS jobs work great. However, because there is no way to schedule daily jobs the tape job will hang on Saturday and Sunday waiting for a tape to be inserted while nobody is in the office. We also have no backups running on weekends, so it's a waste regardless even if we had an auto-loader.

I raised the issue with support (Case #07418519) and they suggested a normal media pool scheduled Monday - Thursday and a GFS pool with the daily schedule disabled. It works but it's not exactly ideal.

Can we get the feature added to configure a more granular schedule for GFS daily jobs?

Thanks!

[david.domask]

Hi Samuel,

Your idea is understood; to confirm, you mean no backups from the source jobs are written to disk over the weekend, so as I get it, there shouldn't be anything on the weekend for the Tape GFS job to backup, correct?

I would just consider placing the library in maintenance mode -- while you will still get the emails about the runs erroring out due to maintenance mode on the library, it should prevent the jobs from sitting there doing nothing.

As for more granular selection on the GFS media pool, will discuss it internally, but I would consider the solution provided by Support to be valid for meeting this, or simply putting the library in Maintenance mode.

[smeadors]

no backups from the source jobs are written to disk over the weekend, so as I get it, there shouldn't be anything on the weekend for the Tape GFS job to backup, correct?

That's correct. In our specific case we aren't making any backups on the weekend regardless. However, if we were, I would still like to be able to configure the GFS job to wait until the following Monday (or whatever arbitrary day) to continue the backups and write the weekend data backup data out-to-tape on the next scheduled day

I would just consider placing the library in maintenance mode

That's something I hadn't considered. If that can be done via PowerShell it could be automated with a scheduled task, or possibly even the scripts Veeam allows users to specify for tape jobs. I suspect we could disable/enable the GFS jobs on weekends as well the same way. I'll look into that as a solution.

I would consider the solution provided by Support to be valid for meeting this

I have no real issues with this solution. I believe it works in our case and since our backups will fit onto a single tape it's not an issue for us. It won't consume extra backup media with the extra fulls written to the basic media pool. I've set this up as of this week and will report back next week with the results of how it preformed.

Thank You

[david.domask]

1. Got it, then disable/enable might work for you. Main reason I didn't suggest it is that disabling/enabling Tape GFS jobs has an additional effect where it will ignore points made prior to the re-enabling.

If the GFS tape job was disabled manually for some period, it will skip all backups for this period after it is resumed.

So it's not a "free" action, but in your case, this might work and can be scripted with Disable-VBRJob and Enable-VBRJob respectively.

2. We indeed have powershell cmdlets for enabling and disabling maintenance mode on the libraries: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=120

3. ++ Got it! To be honest, I like this solution best as it has fewest things to "break" the workflow. If it's suitable for you, I would stick with this.

[smeadors]

Hello Again,

I wanted to report back here for anyone else in the same situation. We've been running the Standard Daily & GFS Weekly/Monthly/Yearly pools for two weeks in production. The process works as expected

I also attempted a powershell script to put the libraries into maintenance mode if a GFS job started on a weekend. It does work but it produces a warning. I'll leave the script I created here for anyone interesting in messing with it further. The script was configured to run before the job started in the job settings

I'm still hoping Veeam will allow users to configure the day-of-week schedule for GFS daily tapes.

Code: Select all

Import-Module -Name Veeam.Backup.PowerShell

# Veeam B&R v11 does not support the ability to schedule the daily tape jobs for GFS media pools. 
# This script checks if the day-of-week matches $DisabledDays and puts the tape library into maintenance mode
# to prevent tape jobs from running on those days. The script will pull tape libraries out of maintenance mode 
# if no days in $DisabledDays match

$DisabledDays = @("Saturday", "Sunday",)

$Day = Get-Date -UFormat %A
$DisabledDays | ForEach-Object -Process {if($_ -eq $Day){
    Write-Debug "$Day Matched. Enabling Tape Libraries Maintenance Mode"
    Get-VBRTapeLibrary | Enable-VBRTapeLibraryMaintenance

    Get-VBRTapeJob | ForEach-Object -Process {if($_.LastState -eq "Working"){
        Write-Debug "Stopping Job"
        $_ | Stop-VBRJob -Gracefully
}}
    
    #Poorly avoid a potential race condition between Job Start and Maintenance Mode Enabling
    Start-Sleep -Seconds 20
    Break
}}

Get-VBRTapeLibrary | ForEach-Object -Process {if($_.Enabled -eq "False"){

    Write-Debug "$Day Not Matched. Disabling Tape Library Maintenance Mode On Libraries"
    Get-VBRTapeLibrary | Disable-VBRTapeLibraryMaintenance

    Start-Sleep -Seconds 20
    Break

}}