Best practices for two hosts without shared storage

[candersoncch]

I've got two ESXi hosts, each with local storage. Veeam B&R is installed in a VM on one host. I have a backup job to external USB storage, and a replication job from one host to the other.

Originally, I was replicating all VMs. However, when the Veeam VM is replicated, hotadd fails and the replication falls back to network mode because the BIOS UUID isn't unique according to this KB article: https://www.veeam.com/kb2159. I stopped replicating the Veeam VM, and this is resolved.

The question I have is that, without a replica of the Veeam VM on the secondary host, I don't have access to Veeam if the primary host fails. I'd have to power on the replica VMs through vCenter, which I understand is not advised, and I'd have no way to restore backups from the USB storage without first creating a new VM, reinstalling Veeam, and restoring the configuration backup, which is a process I don't want to be having to go through in a disaster recovery scenario.

What's the best practice here?

[veremin]

Might be a stupid question, but why not to add to backup server both ESXi hosts as standalone entities and not through vCenter server? Thanks!

[candersoncch]

So I'm clear, if I add both hosts separately instead of adding vCenter, I can replicate the VEEAM VM without causing hotadd to fail?

Then, in a DR scenario, I would manually start the VEEAM VM on the secondary host and use the console to failover the other VMs?

[veremin]

According to the KB article, that should help.

You can also consider using only one backup server deployed at target site and managing everything from it. Should disaster hit the production site, you would still be able to execute failover and restore operations from DR backup server.

Thanks!

[candersoncch]

Excellent, that's very helpful. Thank you!

[veremin]

You are welcome, the scenario I have described is the recommended Disaster Recovery strategy that is implemented by many of our customers - so definitely worth checking. Thanks!