This paper considers a finite-buffer batch arrival and batch service queue with single and multiple vacations. The steady-state distributions of the number of customers in the queue at service completion, vacation termination, departure, arbitrary and pre-arrival epochs have been obtained. Finally, various performance measures such as average queue length, average waiting time, probability that the server is busy, blocking probabilities, etc. are discussed along with some numerical results. The effect of certain model parameters on the key performance measures have also been investigated. The model has potential application in several areas including manufacturing, internet web-server and telecommunication systems. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.