Quick Migration with Replica as Seed VM

[jwmaynar]

I have a VMware infrastructure where all VMs run on local storage on one host server and are replicated on a regular schedule to a second host with local storage. I know that you can shut down a running VM, fail to the replica, and the automatically fail back but that still requires downtime for the servers as you shut them down on the primary host, replicate, power on and then the same process need to repeat to fail back. I was wondering if there is a way to start a Quick Migration job and use a target replica as a seed VM or if such a feature might be in the road map.

[Gostev]

As far as I understand, what you are really asking for is using SmartSwitch during replica failover. We did not implement this for replication because copying large memory state file (a few GB) over WAN will typically take way longer than the shutdown/power on cycle. SmartSwitch does make sense for Quick Migration though, as this one is typically done locally.

[jwmaynar]

We have some clients that have opted to not have shared storage but do have 2 host servers on the same LAN segment. In this case we will use Veeam replication to replicate VMs from one host to another to protect them from a host failure. We've run into the issue of needing to take production offline to preform VMware host maintenance on these folks. While it's definitely possible to shut down the original VM, then fail over to the replica cold and then fail back with Veeam it seemed like almost all the moving pieces are there to be able to fail over to the replica hot and then fail back.

I totally agree that moving a large memory file is not something you'd want to do over a WAN link but over the LAN would make sense.

[Gostev]

So, if we are talking over LAN, then as you may have already heard, vSphere 5.1 provides enhanced VMotion capabilities which support VMotion between separate host with no shared storage.

[jwmaynar]

Yup, and we could also use Veeam Quick Migration to do the same thing, pretty slick. The problem is that these clients don't have enough space usually to house the replica's and the live VMs on the backup host. So to use either the 5.1 vMotion with local storage or Veeam Quick Migration we would have to first delete the replica, migrate, patch, migrate back, and then do a full replication from scratch again.

I realize what I'm suggesting may be a narrow use case, it just seemed that with pre-seeding already available in Veeam and Quick Migrate already available that it might be (relatively) simple to combine the two technologies which would be incredibly helpful in the use case we have.