Future Product Enhancement

[ddockter]

I've run into a situation where it would be nice to have the ability to run pre and post commands for a VM that is included with other VMs in a backup job. Maybe in the future this could be added in "Advanced Options - Guest Processing Settings". In my example I want stop a service on the VM prior to the backup and restart the service after the backup is complete. What I'm doing now is running a scheduled task that kicks off just before the backup starts to stop the service and then running a "post job activity" command to start the service. I would prefer the service not be stopped for the entire backup job - just the backup of that VM. I know that I could put this VM in its own backup, but then I would lose the benefits of dedupe.

[veremin]

Have you considered using VMware pre-freeze/post-thaw scripts in order to stop certain services inside particular VMs? Thanks.

[ddockter]

I was not aware of that functionality. Sounds like that is what I need.

[Vitaliy S.]

Just to add to what Vladmir has proposed above:

You should enable both VMware Tools quiescence and AAIP for this job. In this case the default option will be application-aware image processing for all VMs. Since this option doesn't have pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts, you will then need to add these VMs to exclude list via advanced settings -> Advanced -> Add VM. For all VMs in that list select "edit" and disable application aware image processing. This will allow you to process VMs with pre-freeze/post-thaw scripts via VMware Tools while all other VMs will be backed up with application-aware image processing (the recommended way).

Hope this helps!