Replication Senarios

[peeky1323]

Hi All,

I just wanted to get some advice on what might the best option here. We have a 3x node vSphere Essentials (no storage vMotion) cluster. We have iSCSI shared storage and have just added a new LUN that we need to migrate the VMs to with the absolute minimum downtime we can and not start new backup chains as we keep long retention. I have used Veeam quickmigrate to migrate most of them them. This has worked great on 10 of the 11. The 11th experienced a large "downtime" of about 25 minutes for some reason while the others were flawless. We are left with 3 VMs that are 2TB, 2.5TB, and 3TB. These VMs are also under a fairly high load most of the time. What are your thoughts on the following options for these remaining VMs?

1) Just use quickmigrate and hope no delays occur. I estimate that this will take 8-12 hours judging my the other VMs and their size.
2) Setup replication jobs, fail over, job done. However, we also would like to not have a new backup chain as the replicated VMs have a new VMID.
3) This is the one I really advice on and if it will work to achieve limited downtime, and no new backup chain. Setup Replication job, perform a planned failover, cold storage migrate the disks of the source (powered off) VM, fail back to production keeping all changes. Is this possible?

Many Thanks.
Matt

[Mildur]

Hi Matt

These VMs are also under a fairly high load most of the time.

High load and low downtimes will be most likely a challenge. Unfortunately we cannot really foreseen the amount of downtime required.

Setup Replication job, perform a planned failover, cold storage migrate the disks of the source (powered off) VM, fail back to production keeping all changes. Is this possible?

You mean replicating the disks to the new storage through a Veeam Replica job. Then after a failover, you want to connect the replicated disk to the old VM container? How will you transfer the VM configuration files from the source storage to the target storage?

Best,
Fabian