Last updated on Monday 28th of February 2022 08:52:48 PM

©XSIBackup-Pro Classic: e-mail layout customization

 Please note that this post is relative to old deprecated software ©XSIBackup-Classic. Some facts herein contained may still be applicable to more recent versions though.

For new instalations please use new ©XSIBackup which is far more advanced than ©XSIBackup-Classic.

©XSIBackup-Pro Classic allows to customize the e-mail design on every execution, thus you can customize the look&feel of the e-mail for every client, or simply adapt it to your corporate design. Let's see how this can be achieved.

As you can see in the following screenshot, the e-mail layout has 6 placeholders where the main images composing the e-mail template are positioned. All this six placeholders are customizable by adding the images and their links as a specially formatted string to the --img-list argument. Let's see how to do it...

E-mail placeholders

Start by appending the following arguments to any ©XSIBackup command string of your choice in your ESXi shell. Do not worry, it'll do nothing, as I have appended the --test-mode=true flag at the end (don't forget it):

--img-list="http://33hops.com/img/acme.png;http://33hops.com/|http://33hops.com/img/social/ico_gplus_2.png;https://plus.google.com/|http://33hops.com/img/social/ico_linkedin_2.png;http://linkedin.com|http://33hops.com/img/social/ico_twitter_2.png;http://33hops.com|http://33hops.com/img/social/ico_mail_2.png;http://33hops.com/contact-form.html|http://33hops.com/img/xsibackup_banner_2.jpg;http://33hops.com/xsibackup-pro-vmware-esxi-backup.html" --test-mode=true


(*) We run this examples with a full e-mail authentication string, which comprises all e-mail arguments to autheticate against an SMTP server. You can nevetheless also use any SMTP server stored in your conf/smtpsrvs file, which will be more convenient for you, by just appending --mail-to=your-email@acme.com --use-smtp=N

If you now execute your test backup with proper e-mail submission arguments, you will receive an e-mail that looks like the above. The layout may vary slightly depending on your e-mail client.

You also probably noticed that during the execution of the backup this lines showed up in your terminal:

Setting custom image;link 1 -> http://33hops.com/img/acme.png;http://33hops.com/
Setting custom image;link 2 -> http://33hops.com/img/social/ico_gplus_2.png;https://plus.google.com/
Setting custom image;link 3 -> http://33hops.com/img/social/ico_linkedin_2.png;http://linkedin.com/
Setting custom image;link 4 -> http://33hops.com/img/social/ico_twitter_2.png;http://33hops.com/
Setting custom image;link 5 -> http://33hops.com/img/social/ico_mail_2.png;http://33hops.com/contact-form.html
Setting custom image;link 6 -> http://33hops.com/img/xsibackup_banner_2.jpg;http://33hops.com/xsibackup-pro-vmware-esxi-backup.html


They are the confirmation that ©XSIBackup picked up the images and their links.

As you can see they are nothing but pairs of image URLs and thier corresponding links URLs separated by a semicolon ";". In the --img-list argument that we used before, this pairs are at the same time separated by pipes "|", so the mechanism is quite simple.

In our example we used images that we have prepared and uploaded to our web server, now you can try and use your own. You can use whatever image format the e-mail client supports, tipically JPG, GIF, PNG. Take on account that ©XSIBackup does not limit the size of the images, thus you need to crop the images to the desired final size to compose a balanced layout.

Remove images

Just parse the -none- keyword as the image URL and it will be removed from the e-mail template.

Want more?

Take on account that ©XSIBackup-Pro Classic can apply a different set of images to every backup cycle, and that it can also fire multiple simultaneous backups against a virtually unlimited number of servers. Thus you can:

- Run a backup against each server with a different layout.
- Run multiple backups against each server, grouping VMs and make each of them have a different layout.
- Do any of the above combined with parsed variables, i.e:

http://yourdomain.com/img/\$HOSTNAME.jpg; http://yourdomain.com/\$HOSTNAME/

This last example would load an image named after the ESXi host in the images directory of your server and link it to a folder (physical or virtual) named after the ESXi server too, where you could be storing information about the backup sessions for your customers to review.

If you need a full project, ask for a quote, we'll be glad to bring it out to life for you.

"If you can imagine it, we can do it".