Shutdown Prior \ Boot After

[ntrantham]

I have been digging on the forums for a while trying to find an answer for this. I have seen it listed as a feature request; but never implemented as far as I can tell.

We just recently purchased Veeam and had been running nightly backups on 6 virtual machines. A very small environment. One of those Virtual Machines is a Microsoft Small Business Server 2011.

The problem I am running into is about 1 in 5 backups on the SBS Server will fail, and when it does it leaves multiple VSS Writers, including the Exchange Information Store, in a failed state. This will cause the server to run so slow as to be practically impossible to do anything on and takes longer to try to logon to the server and fix the VSS writers then it does to issue a reboot though ESX.

This happens to a few of our other VM's as well which causes them to have extremely poor performance until the VSS writers are fixed or the server is rebooted.

Given that this is for a small family run company I do all of the IT for them on the side. I need a way to make sure that after the backups are run the servers are not left in a messed up state. The only way I can ensure this is to force the servers to reboot once the backups are done.

Since the backups take a different length of time to complete it is not something I can really schedule through vCenter; unless I just want to give the Backup job an enormous amount of time to run to make sure I don't reboot in the middle of it.

If the VSS Writers get messed up through some other means (which happens on SBS 2011 sometimes) then the backup fails as well and the server is left even worse off.

Basically, a reboot before the backup starts would make sure the VSS Writers are all good; and a reboot after would make sure they are left good even if the backup failed for some reason.

The question is, how to accomplish this? I am really new to Veeam; but all of the other backup solutions we had looked at or tried in the past would allow you to execute scripts or perform actions prior to and after the backup jobs ran. How do I do this in Veeam?

[foggy]

Hi Norman, you can execute pre- and post-backup actions using the custom scripts. Thanks.