CBT and quick migration

[VasilyT]

Hello everyone.

A quick question here: when doing Veeam Quick Migration with smartswitch, is it possible to keep CBT data and continue doing incremental backup of the migrated VM?
If not, is there any way to migrate a VM between datastores and keep doing incrementals? Is it possible with storage vmotion?

Thank you.

[Gostev]

Hi, Vasily. Quick Migration creates the new VM, so CBT has to start from scratch. However, Storage VMotion does preserve CBT (because it does not recreate VM, but rather moves it). Thanks!

[VasilyT]

Thank you, Anton. This makes sense. We're doing our first major test of Quick Migration, so a few more questions, if you don't mind.

1) Is it safe to do a SmartSwitch migration of SQL and Exchange. I've noticed there're no Application Processing options, although it does copy the whole RAM state, so I'm not sure if they'd be useful anyway. So, is it safe?

2) After a "cold" quick migration (with Force Veeam Migration checked) one of the VMs has had its MAC changed (set to Automatic of course). I understand this might happen when re-registering a VM, however I'd prefer to know when it might happen and when it will not.
So, is there a possibility of a MAC change during ANY quick migration? Or just an powered-off one? Can the MAC change during a Vmware Migration (offline)?
What about replication? Is it possible that the replica will get a different MAC after failover?

[veremin]

1) Yes. Moreover, our own IT has performed the same procedure internally at one point.

2) The MAC address will be preserved in both cases (Quick Migration, replication) as long as it was manually assigned on the source VM. Otherwise, with automatic mode, VMware will assign the new MAC address to the target VM automatically.

Thanks.

[VasilyT]

Thank you, Vladimir.

I'm unsure about the MAC thing, though. Are you saying that the MAC could change even after quick migration smartswitch? For the VM this would mean a sudden instant change of the MAC, that does not sound good.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Vasily,

During Quick Migration jobs, Veeam backup server copies VM config file and registers it on the destination host. Since this is a copy of VM, then it, for sure, has the same MAC address, but VMware will automatically trigger an error event for VM MAC conflict and then will try to change the MAC address for destination VM.

If you want to preserve MAC address for the migrated VM, then you need to set MAC address to manual assignment in VM configuration.

Hope this helps!