Moving Strategy

[MCScrapE]

I am in the process of moving to a new data center while having almost zero downtime for my customer servers. I have 100mb bandwidth at each site. I have vCenter and SAN at legacy site and a single host at the new site with enough storage for the critical servers. I have a VPN tunnel established between the two sites. Right now I am replicating the servers over the WAN connection onto the single host. On the "move" night I plan to power on and configure the replica VMs for their new environment and make the necessary DNS changes. Once I get all of my gear out of the legacy site and to the new site I had planned on doing backup jobs of the replicas and then restoring them to the SAN (I don't have enterprise plus to do a vMotion storage).

Several questions I have been kicking around.
First and foremost, is this the best methodology to get my VMs from one data center to the other with what I have to work with? Maybe I should be doing backup/restore jobs to the new site?
Second, with the plan laid out above and everything is running on the SAN again am I going to technically have production VMs labeled as replicas? I believe I did a test and you can backup a replica.
Third, regardless of how I get from A to B once I am in the new site there will be new IP addresses. Can I just simply change the IP address on the VM hosting Veeam and then change the IP addresses of vCenter within Veeam?

Thanks in advance for any ideas or advice.

[MCScrapE]

Had another idea. Would it be possible to take a small NAS and place it in my legacy data center. I then setup a Veeam backup server in my new data center. If I run a backup jobs in this manner does the traffic have to come across the WAN or can the data go straight from the VM hosts to the NAS? I think the answer is yes since the only backup destination folder is something attached to the backup server. Would this be something that the Enterprise Manager could achieve assuming I have a Veeam backup server at each location?

[Vitaliy S.]

First and foremost, is this the best methodology to get my VMs from one data center to the other with what I have to work with? Maybe I should be doing backup/restore jobs to the new site?

There is no best way to do that, everything depends on the site bandwidth/way you're going to move VMs back, but basically provided that you have enough bandwidth to replicate VMs back, I would use replication jobs. On the other hand you may consider using any NAS box to backup all VMs and then restore them on the main site.

Second, with the plan laid out above and everything is running on the SAN again am I going to technically have production VMs labeled as replicas? I believe I did a test and you can backup a replica.

By default we add _replica suffix to replicated VMs, however you can change this name at any time.

Third, regardless of how I get from A to B once I am in the new site there will be new IP addresses. Can I just simply change the IP address on the VM hosting Veeam and then change the IP addresses of vCenter within Veeam?

Yes, you can.

Had another idea. Would it be possible to take a small NAS and place it in my legacy data center. I then setup a Veeam backup server in my new data center. If I run a backup jobs in this manner does the traffic have to come across the WAN or can the data go straight from the VM hosts to the NAS?

All the VM traffic have to go through a backup server first in case vStorage API backup/replication mode is used. That said, if you want to backup VMs locally then you need to have a backup server on the legacy data center.

I think the answer is yes since the only backup destination folder is something attached to the backup server. Would this be something that the Enterprise Manager could achieve assuming I have a Veeam backup server at each location?

Enterprise Manager can be used to manage two backup servers located in different sites, but EM cannot route the traffic between backup servers.