A few updates to the Veeam silent install!

A ways back I wrote an article about how to utilize vRealize Orchestrator to deploy and install Update 2 for Veeam v8 to any of your virtualized Veeam Backup & Replication servers. This has worked well for me as I normally have the vSphere Web Client open anyways – why not just do my updates with this.

Well, with v9 Update 1 there have been a few changes to how you go about silently deploying a Veeam update. First up there is no need to extract the update file – we can simply pass our install parameters directly to the update package – therefore we no longer need the setup.bat file that orchestrates the unpacking and installing! We can simply copy the file out and and pass the /silent, /noreboot, and /log arguments to it – as shown below…

c:\downloads\VeeamBackup&Replication_9.0.0.1491_Update1.exe /silent /noreboot /log c:\downloads\patch.log VBR_AUTO_UPGRADE=1

So, if you had followed along with the previous post and want to update your vRO workflows to be compatible with v9U1 you may need to change a few things. For those starting fresh, I’ll go over the whole process again below.

The Workflow

The vRO workflow is pretty simple (especially now with silent installation improvements) – It really needs to do only two things; 1 – copy out our update file, 2 – run the executable. In order to support these two functions we to first setup a few arguments and input parameters to our workflow

Arguments

vroPathToVeeam (string) – this will contain the path to the Veeam update file that we place on the vRO server (i.e. /var/log/vco/VeeamBackup&Replication_9.0.0.1491_Update1.exe )
guestPathToVeeam (string) – this will contain the path on the target server in which we would like to copy the file (i.e. c:\downloads\VeeamBackup&Replication_9.0.0.1491_Update1.exe )
vmUsername (string) – the username with permissions to copy/run files on the Veeam Backup and Replication server (i.e. administrator@domain.local)
vmPassword (SecureString) – the above users password 🙂

Input Parameters

vm (VC:VirtualMachine) – this will be the virtualized Veeam Backup & Replication server name. We’ve set this up as an input parameter instead of an attribute so we can automatically pass the VM’s name from the right-click context menu inside the vSphere Web Client.

The Schema

As you can see below we basically mimic the two functions mentioned previously with Scriptable Tasks within vRO; Copying the files and Executing the update.

As far as copying the files go it’s a pretty simple script

// establish connection
var host = vm.sdkConnection;
var guestOperationsManager = host.guestOperationsManager;
// create authentication
var guestAuth = new VcNamePasswordAuthentication();
guestAuth.username = vmUsername;
guestAuth.password = vmPassword;
// construct fileManager
var fileManager = guestOperationsManager.fileManager;
result = false;
var attr = new VcGuestFileAttributes();
var srcFile = new File(vroPathToVeeam);
var uri = fileManager.initiateFileTransferToGuest(vm , guestAuth ,guestPathToVeeam, attr, srcFile.length, true);
// Copy File
result = fileManager.putFile(vroPathToVeeam, uri);
asdfa
asdf

// establish connection

var host = vm.sdkConnection;

var guestOperationsManager = host.guestOperationsManager;

// create authentication

var guestAuth = new VcNamePasswordAuthentication();

guestAuth.username = vmUsername;

guestAuth.password = vmPassword;

// construct fileManager

var fileManager = guestOperationsManager.fileManager;

result = false;

var attr = new VcGuestFileAttributes();

var srcFile = new File(vroPathToVeeam);

var uri = fileManager.initiateFileTransferToGuest(vm , guestAuth ,guestPathToVeeam, attr, srcFile.length, true);

// Copy File

result = fileManager.putFile(vroPathToVeeam, uri);

asdfa

asdf

And to execute the actual file once it has been copied (The Execute Update scriptable task)…

var host = vm.sdkConnection;
var guestOperationsManager = host.guestOperationsManager;
var guestAuth = new VcNamePasswordAuthentication();
guestAuth.username = vmUsername;
guestAuth.password = vmPassword;
guestAuth.interactiveSession = false;
var guestProgramSpec = new VcGuestProgramSpec();
guestProgramSpec.programPath = guestPathToVeeam;
guestProgramSpec.arguments = "/silent /noreboot /log c:\downloads\patch.log VBR_AUTO_UPGRADE=1";
guestProgramSpec.workingDirectory = "";
var processManager = guestOperationsManager.processManager;
result = processManager.startProgramInGuest(vm , guestAuth , guestProgramSpec);

var host = vm.sdkConnection;

var guestOperationsManager = host.guestOperationsManager;

var guestAuth = new VcNamePasswordAuthentication();

guestAuth.username = vmUsername;

guestAuth.password = vmPassword;

guestAuth.interactiveSession = false;

var guestProgramSpec = new VcGuestProgramSpec();

guestProgramSpec.programPath = guestPathToVeeam;

guestProgramSpec.arguments = "/silent /noreboot /log c:\downloads\patch.log VBR_AUTO_UPGRADE=1";

guestProgramSpec.workingDirectory = "";

var processManager = guestOperationsManager.processManager;

result = processManager.startProgramInGuest(vm , guestAuth , guestProgramSpec);

And with that we are done – don’t forget to map the relevant input parameters from the global workflow to those inside the individual scriptable tasks…

We can now run this workflow from within the vRO client, select a virtualized Veeam B&R server and have v9 Update 1 automatically deployed and installed to it. To go one step forward you can also go and associate this workflow with the right-click context menu within the vSphere Web Client if you like, then you never have to even open up vRO 🙂

Keep in mind this workflow does nothing to ensure that you have no active jobs – this is something I’d love to add someday, check for running jobs and if there is, wait or cancel them before running the update…

Thanks for reading!

Tags: Veeam vRO

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