replication and failover from vcenter to esx host

[ruidc]

We are a small shop with only 1 vCenter Server co-residing with Veeam on our LAN, and 4 physical hosts total (Prod, Prod_LAN_DR, DR and BackupServer).
We have nightly WAN replication of VMs from Prod and filecopy of our Veeam Config via vCenter from our LAN to the DR site.

If we want to be able to use Failover plans and Re-IP my understanding is that we have to either:
1. separately handle replication of vCenter into DR
or
2. change from referring to the VMs via vCenter and instead use ESXi hosts directly - but losing the portability of the VMs across ESXi hosts (ie. due to change of machine reference IDs - which can be mitigated by the unsupported Veeam migration vCenter migration utility) and having to start new backup chains and re-replicate

... or we live without Re-IP and power up the machines manually via ESXi web on DR and have to reconfigure the IPs
... or we virtualize vCenter and use Veeam to replicate that into DR and have to manually restore it as per https://www.veeam.com/kb1913 but have that extra recovery time

Have i understood correctly?
Is there no way to have a neater solution for failing over when vCenter is unreachable to DR ESXi host?

Regards and thanks in advance,
R

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

If I were you I would recommend to replicate VMs via vCenter Server connection, then use one of the approaches below:

1. have a separate replication job just for vCenter Server (via standalone target ESXi connection). In case of a DR situation, failover vCenter Server first, and then failover the rest VMs via new vCenter Server connection.
2. replicate everything via vCenter Server connection, and in case of a disaster, power up the vCenter Server VM manually, and then failover other VMs as you would usually do
3. host vCenter Server at the remote site all the time. This will allow you to use native failover engine of your Veeam backup server.

Thank you!

[ruidc]

Thanks, If we look at changing to Veeam pull replication, does Gostev's con in post8738.html#p8738 of losing network compression still apply in days of Veeam 9+?

[veremin]

Nope, it does not, assuming proxy server is specified at each side. Thanks.