Scheduling Complexity

[Guilbert]

Previously, with B&R v5, I used Powershell to schedule replication and backup jobs for each evening. This allowed me to schedule some jobs to run every evening and others to run on particular days. It also meant I could always do an ad-hoc backup at any time. Having individual jobs, each with it’s own settings, and then scheduling the jobs as required worked very well.

Having upgraded to B&R 6, I thought I could dispense with powershell as the scheduling had been improved. After a lot of testing however, I can’t figure out how to maintain the flexibility I had before.

Am I right in thinking that if I create a replication job containing a number of VMs I cannot then create a new job which includes a VM from the first job?

Regards, Pete.

[foggy]

Peter, you can create several jobs with the same VMs in them, no limitations here. Thanks.

[Guilbert]

Thanks, I'll give that a try.

We have a mix of Windows server types. Can I backup W2k along with later server types in the same job? It seems to me I can't configure individual vms to enable (for W2k3+) or disable (for W2k) application-aware image processing?

[foggy]

You can both mix different OS's in the job and specify individual application-aware processing settings for each VM (just use the Advanced button on the Guest Processing step of the job wizard).

[Guilbert]

Thanks foggy.

Great support as always...

[Guilbert]

Foggy,

If I create two separate replication jobs with the same VM being replicated to the same place I get the error: The name 'VM_Name' already exists.

I thought from your earlier answer that 'you can create several jobs with the same VMs in them, no limitations'

[dellock6]

Yes, but I think the meaming was "with the same SOURCE VM", your test is really uncommon, why do you want to replica the same VM to the same destination with two different jobs?

[Guilbert]

I have two replication jobs; one runs on week days, the other on weekends. The weekend job contains some of the VMs that are in the week days job.

I assume then that the way I should be doing this is to create three jobs named Weekdays, Weekends, and Everyday. And to ensure that each replicated VM appears only once.

This limits flexibility a tad as moving VMs between jobs is not a seamless operation. It would be nice if each VM replication was a self-contained task that could be scheduled in different jobs but I accept that's not the way it's set up.

[Vitaliy S.]

Peter, you cannot register VMs with the same name in VI inventory.

I assume then that the way I should be doing this is to create three jobs named Weekdays, Weekends, and Everyday. And to ensure that each replicated VM appears only once.

Yes, every job will create a new VM on the destination host. Also you can use different replica suffixes to avoid errors saying about duplicate names.