Veeam Replication Questions

[d-con.net_thomas]

Hello Veeam Community.

We have a request from a customer to user replication to transfer 500+ VMs (120TB) from UK to Austria and as I never had this amount of VM ins single project, I had the idea to write down some of the topics we discussed and hope for your feedback

We have VM Ware environments on both sites, 6.5 on the old and 7 or 8 on the new site.
To keep the existing infrastructure as it is and don´t need to migrate the Vcenter or VBR Server, we want to install a new Vcenter and new Veeam Backup and Replication server on the new site. Use 2 Vcenter and VBR Server parallel on both sites.
The plan is to use the new VBR server to perform the replication and the old VBR server to still run the existing backup jobs until the failover is happening.
We thought about replica seeding, create a backup with the new VBR on the old site and ship the backup storage to the new site.
Enough WAN accelerators and Veeam proxies on both sides
1GB WAN link minimum
We want to use multiple replication jobs and put them into chains
We need to consider the timing of the existing backup and the new replication jobs manually.

Is there something basically I missed or do you think one of these topics are not working or planed well?

I am very grateful for your advice and help.

Thank you very much in advance!

Thomas

[PetrM]

Hi Thomas,

The action plan seems reasonable, and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. However, I'd like to make two comments:
1. It's better to test this plan first and ensure everything works fine on at least a couple of test VMs. We never know what kind of complications we might face in each specific environment. Also, you might consider not migrating all the VMs at once, but rather grouping them and migrating a few groups one after another in different jobs, this approach would be more flexible if something goes wrong during the migration.

2. Why keep two Veeam B&R servers? You can still manage backups on the production site from the Veeam B&R on the DR site and use a remote replica from backup.

Thanks!

[d-con.net_thomas]

Hi PetrM.

Thank you very much for your reply.

1. yes of course that's a very good point and we will try to get a punch of VMs which can be tested before the final failover.
2. On the production site we have a VBR 11 server and we don´t want to touch it if possible, it should just manage the current backups until the failover is planed (work as it is). Otherwise we would need to upgrade and migrate it to DR site because we can´t start this project with non supported VBR version.

Thank you and BR.

Thomas