About Jobs

A job is created whenever you perform any action that changes the status of a managed object in Virtual Machine Manager (VMM). These units of work are tracked in Jobs view. For more information, see How to Monitor Jobs.

In Virtual Machine Manager, each job is represented by one or more cmdlets in the Windows PowerShell – Virtual Machine Manager command shell. You can perform any action in the VMM Administrator Console from the command line, and you can script most operations. For more information, see Using the Virtual Machine Manager Command Shell.

Note

To help you transition to using the command line and scripting in Windows PowerShell, each wizard includes a View Script button on its Summary page that displays the cmdlets that will perform the job that you just requested. You can copy the script and customize it for your own use.

Jobs are composed of steps that are performed sequentially to complete an action. For many simple jobs, such as stopping a virtual machine, the job contains only one step. For more complex jobs, such as running a physical-to-virtual machine conversion on a server, the resulting job is actually a job group comprising several other jobs, which themselves contain numerous steps.

A wizard might create multiple jobs. For example, the Add Hosts Wizard can be used to add multiple hosts to be managed by Virtual Machine Manager. For each host added in this way, a separate job is created and can be tracked individually.

Each job is independent. A job cannot depend on the status of another job. Therefore, if you are using Add Hosts to add multiple hosts, the failure to add one host does not affect the remaining jobs.

Certain jobs require credentials to complete successfully. For example, the job created by the Add Hosts wizard uses those credentials on the virtual machine host to install the Virtual Machine Manager agent.

When a job completes, an audit record is saved that lists the changes that the job made to the VMM object. You can view the audit record in Jobs view by displaying the Change Tracking tab in the details pane.

See Also

Concepts

How to Monitor Jobs
Using the Virtual Machine Manager Command Shell

Other Resources

How to Cancel a Job
How to Restart a Job