Replication of VMs with shared VHDX is not supported

[spgsit5upport]

Error: Replication of VMs with shared VHDX is not supported


That is A LOT of a bugger, as all my main VMs (File, SQL, MIS) are clustered with shared vhdx

Will this be supported?

Seb

[spgsit5upport]

Can anything be done with backed up VMs (as Veeam can actually backup shared vhdx)

Seb

[Vitaliy S.]

You can restore these disks, but as a replication job source it is not supported due to the reasons discussed in another thread > Replication of shared VHDX

[spgsit5upport]

But what are the DR options if one uses shared vhdx?

None?

Backup & restore is not as simple as replication... (via WAN link)

Creation of shared vhdx should have come with massive red warning (Will you ever use DR?) & sirens ringing, as it simply is pure pants

[Vitaliy S.]

In case of DR situation, you're correct, it is not possible to use replication jobs, but you can always run full VM restore operation.

[spgsit5upport]

But that is time consuming (restore of xx Tb of data) & more importantly space consuming, as I need to have additional backup storage in DR location (on same server as DR solution or on yet ANOTHER server)

Which makes the solution way more complicated than it should be

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, you're correct. I'm not saying it is the best approach, but once Microsoft allows creating checkpoints for these VMs you will be able to use replication job for a DR situation.

[moogleassassin]

Afternoon all,

I'm considering rolling out DR replication of our VMs to a secondary datacenter (both managed by us), but we have some critical services that are held on guest level SQL Server clusters using shared storage I think might be a problem.
Some of the guest clusters use in-guest iSCSI disks as the shared storage and others use hyper-v Shared VHDX as shared storage. I've been trying to find details of whether these are supported, best I have been able to find is that guest iSCSI is not supported, but.... shared VHDX is? Looking to get some feedback from the community on the viability of this

"before you ask" disclaimer Unfortunately we can't drop the shared storage and there is lots of configuration on the servers themselves that change on a weekly basis meaning the only way to do DR on them without having complex maintenance tasks of updating the recovery scripts after every change. So getting rid of the shared storage is not viable.

Can you replicate (and failover/failback) from a private primary DC to a secondary private DC a VM using a guest level WSFC (windows failover cluster) utilizing shared VHDX as the shared storage?

I'll be monitoring this thread every 1/2 hour so I can reply to any questions quickly.

Thanks

M.

[nefes]

Unfortunately, replication of VMs with shared VHDX is not supported. The reason is, replication stores its restore points as VM checkpoints, and also relies on checkpoints as temporary storages while failing over/back. However Hyper-V does not support taking checkpoints of such disks.
You may want to utilize backup job instead, it is supported for such disks, however only in crash-consistent mode.

[Shaveen]

Hello all,

Sorry to post in this old thead but I wanted to have an advise on the replication of shared disk
If we select only the os disk or isci 0:0 on the exclude tab in the job setting, it was suppose to replicate the vm without the shared disk which is L: drive in my case right?
But it fails with error ''Processing vms with shared vhdx disks is not supported''

Thank you
Shaveen

[david.domask]

Hi, excluding disks just excludes it from the backup, but the checkpoint is still needed for the entire machine, which is not possible to do. You need to set up Shared VHDSets: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... er=110#vms