Create a Cron Schedule workflow

Goal

The Create a Cron Schedule workflow creates a schedule that can be used to specify times for various activities: for example, transferring Snapshot copies of data from source to destination partners in SnapMirror or SnapVault protection relationships.

Prerequisites

You must be running Clustered Data ONTAP 8.2 or later.

About this workflow

This workflow creates a cron schedule on the specified cluster using the schedule name, cron minutes, cron hours, cron months, cron days of the week, and cron days of the month indicated.

If the schedule created by this workflow is being assigned to a SnapMirror or SnapVault relationship, the cluster specified is the destination cluster, and a Snapshot copy transfer job is started as per this schedule.

Cron schedule executes a job when all the conditions in the inputs are satisfied. For example, if cron Minutes, cron Hours and cron Days of Week inputs are specified, the job is executed only on the specified days and at the specified times. If cron Month is also specified, the job executes only in the specified month and on the specified day and at the specified hour, and minute.

WFA user actions

1.       Click Portal > Data Protection > Create a Cron Schedule to display the Executive Workflow dialog box for the Create a Cron Schedule workflow.

2.       Specify the values for the appropriate input parameters. The input parameters are as follows:

·         Cluster

·         Schedule Name

·         Cron Minutes

·         Cron Hours

·         Cron Days of Month

·         Cron Days of Week

·         Cron Months

 

3.       Click Execute.

User input descriptions

 

User Input

Description

Cluster (Mandatory)

The name of the cluster where the cron schedule is to be created.

Schedule Name (Mandatory)

The cron schedule name.

Cron Minutes (Mandatory)

Specifies the minutes within each hour when the job is scheduled on the cluster. The type of job depends on the object that this schedule is applied to.

·         This is a comma separated list of integers between 0 and 59 inclusive.

·         Leaving the field blank or entering a value of -1 implies that all minutes are included.

Cron Hours (Optional)

Specifies the hours of the day when the job is scheduled on the cluster.

·         This is a comma-separated list of integers between 0 and 23 inclusive.  

·         Leaving the field blank or entering a value of -1 implies that all hours of the day are included.

Cron Months (Optional)

Specifies the months within each year when the job is scheduled on the cluster.

 

·         This is a comma separated list of values from 0 through 11.

·         Leaving the field blank or entering a value of -1 implies that every month is included.

Cron Days of Month

(Optional)

Specifies the days within each month when the job is scheduled on the cluster.

 

·         This is a comma-separated list of values from 1 through 31.

·         Leaving the field blank or entering a value of -1 implies that every day of the month is included.

Cron Days of  Week

(Optional)

Specifies the days within each week when the job is scheduled on the cluster.

 

·         This is a comma separated list of integers from 0 through 6 where 0 represents Sunday, 1 represents Monday, and so on.  

·         Leaving the field blank or entering a value of -1 implies that all days are included.

Workflow description

When completing the default Create a Cron schedule workflow, WFA executes the following task:

1.       Create Cron Schedule. WFA calls the Create schedule - Perl command to generate a schedule for running jobs. Applied to data protection, this schedule can be assigned to SnapMirror and SnapVault relationships to specify times for source to destination Snapshot copy transfers.

 

Results

After the Create a Cron Schedule workflow is successfully completed, a new cron schedule is created on the specified cluster with the given schedule name, cron minutes, cron hours, cron months,  cron days of week, and cron days of month.

Customization

 

1.       This workflow can be customized to create an interval schedule in addition to or instead of a cron schedule.

2.       The command used with this workflow can be used inside a workflow that creates both the protection relationship and the schedule simultaneously.