Virtual thoughts: Random comments on the IT industry

One of the many use cases for Veeam Backup & Replication is disaster recovery, as the name of the product suggests it can certainly replicate virtual machines from a production environment to a secondary- or disaster recovery environment. While it is a very straight forward process running through a wizard selecting source and target environments and the start replicating the VM across the network, you can even have your virtual machines replicated to a Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP), if you don’t have a disaster recovery site of your own.

Replicating over the network may not be optimal in all scenarios, at least not the first initial full replication cycle. Let’s say you have a few very large virtual machines that you want to protect by sending them to a disaster recovery site hosted by your VCSP but it’s too big to actually be transferred over the network within the available backup window, what do you do? In Veeam Backup & Replication, you can seed an initial copy of the virtual machine to your service provider using some sort of transportable solution. USB drives, tapes or solutions of that nature – using “sneaker net”.

The basic concept is to get a copy of the virtual machine to the service provider so they can import the VM into their environment and when you start replicating over the network, you just send the changes made to the VM that has occurred since you made the copy of the VM. No need for a full transfer of the VM over the network.

If you are a service provider using VMware vCloud Director (vCD) 10 with the new HTML5 UI for providers, please note that “import from vSphere” is not available in the H5 UI. What’s even more annoying is that the flex UI has also been disabled by default in vCD 10, so to be able to import the VM into the Org vDC of the customer, you first need to enable the flex UI of vCD:

Step 23 – VCSP environment: Import VM in vCD from vSphere.

Select “Move VM” and not “Copy VM” in the Import wizard.

Select the source VM from the customer production hypervisor (the same used in step 1).

Select the Org vDC to use (same as in step 15).

Select vApp and storage policy to be used.

Select desired restore points to keep.

Select desired replication mode.

In the Seeding-tab, in the “Replica mapping” section, select “Map replicas to existing VMs”, click on the VM and select edit.

Select the seeded VM from step 17.

Set a desired replication schedule.

If desired: Click “Run the job when I click Finish”.

Click “Finish”.

Verify that replication successfully finishes.

The replication job only transfers changed blocks since the backup/import was made. You must be logged in to post a comment.