Feature Request: Failover plan and snapmirror

[scarywolf]

I would love to see failover plans that can leverage Netapp snapmirror destinations.

[Alec King]

There are no plans for major enhancements to failover plans in Veeam Backup & Replication; going forward this functionality is available in our Veeam Availability Orchestrator product (VAO). This is an orchestration engine that sits on top of B&R.
VAO currently supports Veeam B&R replicas in v1.0, and in v2.0 (releasing soon) we will add DR planning for orchestrated restores from backed-up VMs.

We are always researching and planning how best to extend VAO, and I'll take your request as a +1 for replicating storage integration. Thanks for the feedback!

[scarywolf]

Thanks for the quick reply. Figured it was worth a shot so I would never have to touch SRM again.

[veremin]

In the meantime can you elaborate on what exactly you mean by faiover plans leveraging Snapmirror destinations? Thanks!

[scarywolf]

Sure. Veeam is aware of the VMs that live in a mirror destination -- you can restore individual VMs. Also, Veeam is aware of the VMs and restore points (snapshots) regardless of whether it initiated the snapshots (really cool). However, for bringing up multiple VMs at once with a reasonable RTO it might be insufficient (it's still flex-clone / storage vmotion under the covers).

Now that I look at it, the re-IP and network mapping goodness within Veeam lives in the replication job configuration -- so I guess what I am really asking for is a way to Import an existing replication job based on array (snapmirror) replication, and then create a failover plan based of this. Similar to how you can use snapshot technology in place of a Veeam repository for backup jobs.

I do realize it's not a trivial ask -- all the failover / failback scenarios would have to be treated differently depending on how things are replicated (Veeam vs array). Still, would be cool....