What triggers the Failover Plan

[ituhp]

Hi,
I am new to Veeam and trying to understand failover plans and how they are activated.
We have 2 physical servers running HyperV and a backup PC.
We connect to BUP to create all the jobs, etc.
We backup the VMs on Server1 to the BUP local drive and copy to external drive, and replicate the VMs on Server1 to Server2.
I am trying to understand what exactly triggers the failover plan to start the failover from Server1 to Server2.
Only servers with replicas can be failed over, right?
I assume that if the VMs on Server1 were not pingable from BUP PC, this would start the failover?
What if the BUP PC died? Would that cause a failover as Server1 can`t talk to it?
Or is it solely whether the BUP PC can contact the primary host (server1)?

If anyone is able to point me to somewhere where there is a little more detail about what actually triggers a failover, it would be greatly appreciated.
So excited to learn more about Veeam.

[Mildur]

Hello

Welcome to the forum.

Failover plans are working with Veeam Replicas. Failover plans helps you, to start the vm replicas in the correct order if they have dependencies. For example, first start the active directory controller, then start the exchange server.

Failover plans have to be started manually by the administrator. They never start automatically. Before you start the failover plan, check that the original vm isn‘t running anymore.

If you want to automatize the failover plans, you can use monitoring solutions (for example Veeam One) and scripts to start the failover plan if a vm cannot be reached.

What if the BUP PC died? Would that cause a failover as Server1 can`t talk to it?

For the failover (and failback), the veeam Server must be running. If the veeam server is down, you can start up the replica by yourself, but then you have to be carefull. The old replica jobs must be deleted and you have to create new replica jobs to replicate the vms back to the original host.

Thanks
Fabian

[ituhp]

ah, ok. cool.
So, if they don`t auto start, then that solves all my worries.
That being said, we do use Veam One, so this is something I will look at possibly doing over there then.

To summarise, I should create the plans as a guide for VBR to use when I kick off the plan, and it won`t auto failover unless configured to do so in V1.

[Mildur]

To summarise, I should create the plans as a guide for VBR to use when I kick off the plan

Correct. It helps you to power on the replicas in the correct order.

and it won`t auto failover unless configured to do so in V1.

Correct. Just for your information, veeam One doesn‘t have that feature build in, but you can build something with alarms and custom scripts.