The best part of the new Veeam Standalone Console is the fact that Veeam PowerShell snap-in installs as part of this component, and it includes a new cmd-let: Connect-VBRServer. YES! No more PowerShell remoting to invoke your Veeam PowerShell scripts.
Where’s the powershell snap-in?
Up to Veeam Backup & Replication v8, powershell was installed and available exclusively in the VBR server itself. There was no separated snap-in that could have been installed on another machine. For this reason, the only way to manually run or schedule a powershell script was to do it directly on the Veeam server, or by using Powershell Remoting. Not a big problem when it was a scheduled job that you configure once and let run, but when it was time to test scripts using an editor and do multiple tests, it was a bit limited as we had to connect to the VBR server using a remote desktop, or use a workstation in conjunction with Powershell Remoting.
Welcome Connect-VBRServer!
One of the coolest addition to Veeam Backup & Replication v9 has been for sure the Standalone Console:
Along with the Standalone console, Veeam powershell is installed by default in any v9 installation (together with the 4 Veeam Explorers). So, any workstation with the standalone console also has the needed Veeam powershell components. In fact, you can open a powershell session and run:
asnp veeampssnapin
and see that Veeam cmdlets are loaded and ready to be used. Among the cmdlets however, one of the new coming with v9 is really interesting:
Connect-VBRServer
If you have ever used VMware Powershell, or as they call it PowerCLI, you know for sure Connect-VIServer. It’s used to connect first to a remote vCenter server, so that every following instruction in a powershell script is executed against the remote server. For Veeam, this is the same exact command. Say for example I want to list all the existing backup jobs registered in a Veeam server, I can run the command:
Get-VBRjob | format-table -Property Name,JobType
and see the complete list of the existing jobs. Any command you can run locally can now be executed from remote, and this option is even more powerful if you have multiple Veeam servers and you want to run commands against many of them at the same time.
When you are finished, yo can also run:
Disconnect-VBRServer
To close the remote session.
Awesome!! Was just testing scripts today with VeeamBR 8 and having to do it one the Veeam VM itself and was thinking how cool it would be to have something like PowerCli’s connection for Veeam! Another upgrade reason for V9!