Chaining Together Veeam SureBackup Verification Jobs

So my most recent conundrum in implementing Veeam Backup and Replication 6.5 Enterprise was getting SureBackup up and running. I wanted to set aside each Sunday to check all of my backup jobs.

Veeam has wisely allowed backup jobs to be chained; I set my first backup job to start at a certain time, and set the next job to start when the first one finishes, and so forth. It's such an elegant way to do things, and I commend Veeam for implementing it. What I don't understand is why they didn't make this feature accessible for any job that could be scheduled. I don't do replications, so I'm not sure if you can do it there, but I know for a fact that you cannot do it with SureBackup jobs.

Therefore, I needed to dust off my chops and head back to starting and running jobs via Powershell. I got my script syntax and methodology from a great post in this thread on the Veeam forums by v.Eremin.


Add-PSSnapin VeeamPSSnapin
$Job1 = Get-VSBJob -name "SB_Daily_1"
$Job2 = Get-VSBJob -name "SB_Daily_2"
$Job3 = Get-VSBJob -name "SB_Daily_3"

#This starts the first Job, then puts the script to sleep for 5 minutes
Start-VSBJob $Job1
Start-Sleep -s 300

#This section checks the status of the last job every 5 minutes, and starts the next one if it's done.
If($Job1.GetLastState() -ne "Working") {Start-VSBJob $Job2}
Else
{
do
{
Start-sleep -s 300
$status = $Job1.GetLastState()
}while ($status -eq "Working")
Start-VSBJob $Job2
}

#This section checks the status of the last job every 5 minutes, and starts the next one if it's done.
If ($Job2.GetLastState() -ne "Working") {Start-VSBJob $Job3}
Else
{
do
{
Start-sleep -s 300
$status = $Job2.GetLastState()
}while ($status -eq "Working")
Start-VSBJob $Job3
}

So, first you need to load the Veeam PowerShell Snap-In, and then you declare your job names as variables for later use. Then, you start the first SureBackup job.

Within each subsequent section, you check if the last job is still working. If not, start the next job, and if it is still processing that job the script enters a do-while loop wherein it goes to sleep for 5 minutes, then checks the status of the first job again. If it's still processing, the script re-executes the do-while loop. Finally, when it sees that the job is finished, it will start the next job.

This loop is repeated for each subsequent job.