One of my co-workers brought this up lately and I thought it interesting. I have talked to a few customers about it and they had not thought of it either. So here it is. The scoop on script and message callouts. And it will not be quite what you expect.
Many of you with SRM will know we can do a script or message callout before, or after a VM starts. See below for an example of a message callout – Hello from Post Power On!.
What is interesting is that you can also put them in place you may not expect and places you are already familiar with. See below for an example of that.
You can see a message, titled Test Message 1 that will occur right after the shutdown of protected machines and before preparing storage. You can also see Test Message 2 which is a pre-power on for TestWK2 and that means it will display before the VM starts.
What is important here is this message (Test Message 1) will stop the entire plan until it is acknowledged. With Test Message 2 it will not stop the plan, just the recovery of TestKWK2. A bit of a difference!
You will need to select Continue above for the entire plan to continue.
What one of my co-workers was worried about was if it was a script instead of a message, and the script failed would it stop or fail the plan. I was worried about that myself, so I tested it.
You can see above a script has failed, but yet Preparing storage is continuing. So a failed script in this position will NOT hurt the recovery plan. Good to know.
Another screen-shot below shows that the Test Message 1 has continued fine, and that Test Message 2 which is part of TestWK2 is waiting for acknowledgment, but the plan continues with TestWK3.
I wanted everyone to know a few things from this little blog article. The first is that message callouts, or scripts, can be in a variety of places, and not just in the pre and post of VMs being recovered. But also, if you put one somewhere a little different like before preparing storage, and if a script fails, it will not cause the plan to fail.
I hope this was useful, and use the comments to leave a comment or suggestions for this blog to report on!
