Some help on writing DR scenario

[plavielle]

Hi all.

I'm in the process to write a DR scenario, but i need some help.

On production servers host i've setup veeam to replicate VM on DR site. All works well no error message.

My question is : If my production servers goes offline suddenly, what do i need to do on DR site to put online correctly ???

I assume it's a dumb question because i have an option on replicated VM called "start", but if i look on replicated VHDX there are the exact size of data on it and not the size of the original VHDX.

For example the original data VHDX has a size of 1.5 TB but the replicated VHDX has a size of 1.02 TB.

Thank for your help. Many document to put in place HYPERV replication but not much on disaster recovery plan explanation.

[david.domask]

Hi plavielle,

To perform a failover in a disaster recovery event, from the Veeam UI you simply will start a Failover and Veeam will handle bringing up the replicas. Please note that while "manual failover" is possible it is strongly advised against as it may result in undesired behavior as per the note in the User Guide.

Regarding your concerns on the size, do you maybe have screenshots to show what you're seeing? Similarly, you can test a failover and leave the VM disconnected from the network to avoid affecting production, and it will bring up the Replica VM so that you can check and test if desired. Once you're satisfied with the results, in this case you can simply use Undo Failover.

Note however that Undo Failover does not preserve changes made on the replica -- in a real DR event where you need to ensure changes made while the replica was running are merged back to production, you would use the Failback operation.

[plavielle]

Hi David. I think you misundertood my question.

My question was : why the disk of my replicated VM are "dynamic" disk and not "fixed" like in the original VM.
And, so, in this case and in a case of un "unplaned" failover (sunden crash of primary server) how i can get online the exact copy of the original VM.

Thanks

[david.domask]

Hi plavielle,

Apologies if I missed where you were discussing dynamic vs fixed, I must have missed it in the original description.

There is at least one situation I recall off the top of my head (Replica seeding) where the disks will be restored as dynamically expanding.

For situations where the Veeam server is inaccessible and unable to perform the operations, the correct procedure would simply be to spin-up a Veeam Backup and Replication server and restore from the Configuration Backup; that will bring the Veeam server online and ready for performing the failovers.