If you’ve been adapting VMware Protection Policies via VBA in your environment (like so many businesses have been!), you’ll likely reach a point where you want to be able to run a protection policy from the command line. Two immediate example scenarios would be:
- Quick start of a policy via remote access*
- External scheduler control
(* May require remote command line access. You can tell I’m still a Unix fan, right?)
Long-term users of NetWorker will know a group can be initiated from the backup server by using the savegrp command. When EMC introduced VMware Protection Policies, they also introduced a new command, nsrpolicy.
The simplest way to invoke a policy is as follows:
# nsrpolicy -p policyName
For example:
[root@centaur ~]# nsrpolicy -p SqueezeProtect 99528:nsrpolicy: Starting Vmware Protection Policy 'SqueezeProtect'. 97452:nsrpolicy: Starting action 'SqueezeProtect/SqueezeBackup' with command: 'nsrvba_save -s centaur -j 544001 -L incr -p SqueezeProtect -a SqueezeBackup'. 97457:nsrpolicy: Action 'SqueezeProtect/SqueezeBackup's log will be in /nsr/logs/policy/SqueezeProtect/544002. 97461:nsrpolicy: Action 'SqueezeProtect/SqueezeBackup' succeeded. 99529:nsrpolicy: Vmware Protection Policy 'SqueezeProtect' succeeded.
There you go – it’s that easy.