Custom Scripts Question

[rklingaman]

I've been working on developing some custom scripts for our backup environment had some questions about delay and timing of these scripts.

At the moment I have three scripts that I'm working with:

1. Script to pause Zenoss Monitoring solution which shuts down mysql and then the Zenoss application. If you were to run this manually it would take 10 seconds for it to shut down.

2. Shortel server which has its own scripts to shutdown and pause all of its services. Not sure yet how long this one will take.

3. Mysql on a Windows 2008 Server. Plan at the moment is to just turn off the service on MySQL. Should only take a couple seconds to turn off.

My question is how does all the timing work with Veeam and snapshot and running the scripts. Does the snapshot wait until the script is finished running before it takes a snapshot? Does the script lets say a shell script wait until the command is finished before it finishes?

For a windows where you use a script to call the pre freeze or post thaw scripts environment following these recommendations:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... Id=1006671

Will a snapshot start right after it has called the other script? In this question my guess is yes it will and I need to put a pause in there.

Some of these questions may be basic scripting knowledge which I'm no expert on scripting but I was surprised through all my goggling and looking on these forums that these questions were not brought up.

[vMO]

If you use vmware tools quiesence in the backup job advanced options for this vm's, this post script is called before vmware takes the vm snapshot, after that the thaw script will be executed.
Location of post/thaw script depends on os and vmware tools version. Especialy if the servers where first installed with a esx version before 4.x, tools/script location is different.

[rklingaman]

I'm aware of when the script is called but that doesn't answer any of my questions about the timing.

[Vitaliy S.]

Does the snapshot wait until the script is finished running before it takes a snapshot?

Yes, snapshot waits till the script finishes to do its job (at least it should), but it's not Veeam who controls it.

Taken from VMware SDK/API documentation:

This fault is thrown when creating a quiesced snapshot failed because the (user-supplied) custom pre-freeze script in the virtual machine exited with a non-zero return code. This indicates that the script failed to perform its quiescing task, which causes us to fail the quiesced snapshot operation.

In other words VMware tracks the results of pre-freeze scripts and based on the output decides whether to invoke snapshot creation task or not.