Adding Veeam Proxies to jobs via Powershell

There will come a time in every growing environment when you need to scale your Veeam Backup and Replication deployment to help keep up with ever increasing demands as it pertains to backing up all those new virtual machines.  Veeam itself has a couple of different deployment models when it comes to scaling – we can scale up – this is done by adding more CPU and RAM to our current proxies and increasing the number of maximum concurrent tasks that our proxies can process – a good rule of thumb for this one is dedicating a CPU per task, so 2 concurrent tasks = 2 CPU’s.  Another option when it comes to scaling Veeam is scale out, which is done by building and adding additional Veeam proxies into the fold.  Which one you chose is completely up to you however in my experience I’ve had a better experience by scaling out and adding more Veeam proxies into my infrastructure – why?  Not really sure, I just don’t like having more than 2 or 3 processes hitting any one proxy at the same time – just a preference really…

If we have accepted defaults when creating our backup/replication jobs they should be set to ‘Automatic selection’ as it pertains to our Backup Proxy settings – this means our work is done as as soon as we add the proxy into our backup infrastructure it will now be available to all the jobs.  That said, if you have changed settings (like me) to specify certain groups of proxies for certain jobs then we will have to edit each and every job in order to have it utilize our new proxy.   This isn’t a hard process but can present some challenges as it pertains to time depending on how many jobs you have.  I don’t have an extreme amount of jobs, maybe 10 or so, but I also don’t like doing the same thing over and over as it often leads to mistakes.

Enter PowerShell

So with all that said here’s a quick little Powershell script that you can utilize to add a new proxy to a listing of existing jobs.  As you can see I’ve chosen to add it to all of my jobs, but this can easily be modified to get only the jobs you want by passing some -Filter parameters to the Get-VBRJob cmdlet.  The script is pretty simple, taking only one parameter, the proxy to add (***NOTE*** you will need to go into Veeam B&R and configure this machine as a proxy within your Backup Infrastructure, that part isn’t automated), looping through all of my jobs, retrieving a list of existing proxies and adding the new one to that list, then applying the new list back to the job.  It does this for both the source proxies and the target proxies (as you can see with -Target).

Param ( [string]$proxyToAdd )

Add-PSSnapin VeeamPSSnapIn

Simply save your script (I called it AddProxyToJobs.ps1) and run it as follows…

c:\scripts\AddProxyToVMs.ps1 newproxyname

There is absolutely no error checking within the script so by all means make sure you get the syntax right or you could end up with a slew of errors.  Either way, this is a nice way to add a new proxy to a list of jobs without having to manually edit every job.  And as I mention with every script I write if you have any better ways to accomplish this, or see any spots where I may have screwed up please let me know….