vSphere Clone or Veeam Restore to new VM

[hmusa]

Hi, I'm building a new Citrix 7.6 site and want to stand it up in parallel to our production XenApp 6.5 farm (parallel upgrade). I don't think any of our production VMs can run in both farms/sites simultaneously, so I'm thinking of doing a vSphere clone of them, removing the 6.5 stuff from them adding the 7.6 and raising them in the 7.6 site.

Since those production VMs are live, I'm afraid of trying clone them during office hours. I'm thinking of doing a Veeam Restore instead, to new machines and files. Just wondering if there are obvious benefits to going with one tool or the other. Which tool will better manage machine names, mac addresses, SIDs? Am I missing anything - what else need I make sure I change so that they don't bump heads in our domain when running simultaneously? I should be fine with licensing (all volume licenses, datacenter etc.).

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Thomas,

If you want to test the new software installed to your production VMs, then I would suggest going with Veeam backup job route. Once you create a backup file, do restore it to a Sandbox environment and verify all the changes you want to make. After that, you safely migrate this VM to a production environment.

Thanks!

[veremin]

Since you want to create a copy of working Veeam, the replication job might be your way to go. Select required VMs and create replicas for them. The replica VMs can be then run and tested inside isolated environment (thanks be to SureReplica functionality). Thanks.