Clone VM environment

[kpax]

Hey Guys,

I have a task coming up that requires me to clone our entire operational environment to a sister company. This includes everything, AD DS/Exchange/Sharepoint/SQL/File services, the whole thing. Its a bit of data, 9-10tb. I am looking at effective ways to do this. Both companies operate Veeam B&R and I have a spare Qnap.

What I am thinking is running a Backup job to the spare Qnap each night the week prior to the move. Than the day of the move I do a final backup for the most recent changes, physically move the Qnap to the sister companies location, plug it in to the network, add it as a repo to their Veeam server and start restoring VMs to there environment.

I feel like this would work pretty well. I will have a very limited time to copy the VMs. I have been giving a 1 day window and seeding\copying the VMs over the VPN or WAN is out of the question because of vague policy reasons.

Does anyone see a problem with this solution?

[foggy]

Considering limited time, I'd take a host from their environment (if applicable) to your location, perform replication of all the VMs to it, then take it back to the target location to just turn all the VMs on.

[kpax]

Considering limited time, I'd take a host from their environment (if applicable) to your location, perform replication of all the VMs to it, then take it back to the target location to just turn all the VMs on.

Unfortunately their environment is shared storage backed (no local disk) and they only have one appliance. It would be nice though, if they had a host with +10tb of local disk.

Would adding the QNAP to my ESXi hosts as a NFS Datastore and replicating the VMs to it, then moving that over to the other location and adding it as a NFS Datastore on there hosts, be better then what I proposed?

I feel like it may be getting to complex at that point.

[foggy]

No, your approach should also work. Consider having hotadd proxy on the target host for faster restores (or even direct SAN, if applicable).

[PTide]

Hi,

Sounds good, but be very careful with MAC addresses of AD and Network Policy Server (if any), because MAC address that differs from original one can cause a mess. Please refer to this article for details.

Thank you.

[kpax]

Thanks Foggy and PTide,

I will read in to the concerns regarding MAC addressing and I absolutely will have a proxy for hot adds in the ESXi stack at the sister site.

Thanks guys!