VXrail and individual addition of hosts vs Vcenter

[william.bishop]

I have v12 installed, at the moment I would like to change the configuration to add individual hosts vs adding it in via vcenter. VXrail is slightly different, so I was wondering if this would present any issues (I can't think of how it would....but you know, diligence).

Thanks;

[Origin 2000]

Because of managing VxRail and non-VxRail setups i would like to ask where you see the different from a veeam perspektive? My VMs moved around a lot in the Cluster because of DRS or when applying vSphere ESXi updates and i dont thinkt that veeam can track the IDs when you add standalone Hosts and discover the VMs. If you do so.... please check how its going with the vDS also.

Regards,
Joerg

[william.bishop]

That was my main concern. I know a lot of sites don't use vcenter in veeam...I've seen it both ways. With vxrail, I think I'll err on the side of caution and leave it as is. With all of the performance problems we have with cdp and replication windows, I'd prefer not to introduce another variable.

[Andreas Neufert]

When you add VMs to Veeam Jobs we identify them by the moref ID, which is the really only way to detect that this is the same VM.
If you move a VM from one host to the other we are losing the VM to backup relationship. So you would need to start a fresh backup set.
You can do this for example by creating jobs that contain the hosts (and therefore all VMs of the hosts), but this would mean whenever you move a VM to another host, a new backup chain is created (starting by a full). So you need a lot of backup space and can not have individual settings for specific VMs. vCenter gives us the moref ID so that we can track VMs within multiple hosts and can continue backups. It is perfectly fine to use the vCenter for management and needed. If vCenter goes down in a disaster, you can add the ESXi hosts directly and start restores without the vcenter as needed (for example to restore the vcenter).

[william.bishop]

Perfect, I needed the process explanation, makes perfect sense.

Thanks!