Replication - vCenter VCSA and Veeam Servers

[Strecker25]

We are architecting our DR site and will use veeam for replication. We will have plenty of bandwidth (20Gbps dedicated fiber) on a layer 2 extension of our primary datacenter vlans so no re-ip necessary.

Where I'm a bit hung up is wrapping my head around vCenter. We use a virtual appliance v5.5 currently, and it is replicated using veeamjust fine. Obviously in order to perform failover in the case of an event we will need the Veeam primary server, it's SQL database server, and vCenter all functioning.

The way I see it those three servers will need to be manually spun up at the DR site. My hangup is since those are _replica VM's (including Veeam) What is going to happen when we fire up the Veeam_replica VM outside of the software? Are there no Failback capabilities once the primary site is restored?

How is everyone else handling DR for the essential VM's such as veeam and vcenter? We want to remain under a single vcenter server so that we can move workloads between the primary and DR clusters under normal operations.

[foggy]

Ryan, there're a number of existing topics on this, here's one of them. Basically, you can have Veeam B&R instance responsible for replication jobs in the target location, this will allow you to quickly failover vCenter Server (provided you replicate it pointing the corresponding job to a ESXi host directly) and then other VMs. Otherwise vCenter Server failover can be performed manually, via vSphere Client (no automatic failback, right, but you can then replicate it back, when needed).