Planned failover zero data loss (eg host maintenance)

[Brendan_CSEL]

Hi folks. I've probably missed this in the documentation somewhere.

What is the procedure to temporarily "failover" a group of VMs to a backup host - with zero data loss - so that the main host can get some maintenance?

The standard failover process seems to revert to the time of the last replication event. For zero data-loss I am guessing I should...
- shut down the VM(s)
- run the replication job one more time
- failover and start up the replica(s)
- do host maintenance
- shut down replica
- replicate back?
- failback and spin up original VMs?

Does that sound right?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Brendan,

Everything is correct, but for one thing - no need to shutdown and replicate VM replica back. This will be done for you automatically after initiating a replica failover operation (see our User Guide, page 57):

- shut down the VM(s)
- run the replication job one more time
- failover and start up the replica(s)
- do host maintenance
- failback and spin up original VMs

Thanks!

[Brendan_CSEL]

Excellent thank you.

[Brendan_CSEL]

Hmmm, how about if my planned failover includes the VM that has all of the Veeam components installed and another is the SQL Server (containing the Veeam database)?

If I shut down either the "Veeam" VM or the SQL Server, how do I run the final "pre-failover" replication and then the failover/failback operations on those VMs?

I assume I'll need to install Veeam (or some components) elsewhere? The client only has the two Hyper-V hosts that are vaguely modern. They do have a couple of old (10+ years) servers sitting in a corner if required.

Any advice for a configuration/process to do a (temporary) planned failover of all VMs from one host to another (including Veeam and SQL) is greatly appreciated.

[Vitaliy S.]

In this situation you need to install Veeam backup server elsewhere.

Your best bet would be to either use Veeam backup server import/export configuration functionality (see our User Guide, page 219) or migrate existing Veeam SQL database to the old server and re-use this database with a new Veeam backup server installation (search these forums for detailed procedure to follow).

Once your planned maintenance/failover is complete, you need to revert all these changes back to your initial configuration. Hope this helps!