Automate Replication of V2V?

[jimbo_wa]

Hi - I'm looking to automate a V2V process (within our VMware estate) utilising regional Veeam B&R 'nodes' as we're spread globally. This will be across vCenters and versions of ESXi too, so unfortunately the 6.5 vMotion goodness will not be applicable in all instances.

My thinking is that we have a B&R server in each region (EMEA/APAC/AMERS) and a proxy in each regional DataCenter, this keeps the traffic mostly contained as cross region V2V's are rare.

In an ideal world we would be able to supply the source VM and a destination vCenter via a PowerShell script from the specific region's B&R server, and this would automatically utilise (or may need expressly adding) the 'closest' proxies to migrate the VM in question.

This would be a (luke)warm migration as potentially network vLAN/IP's would need to be reconfigured once the V2V has completed and we don't utilise DHCP for servers.

I've read through the Veeam PowerShell Reference and Start-VBRQuickMigration seems to be where we need to be at, but has anyone done any scripting and found any gotchas in operation?

I'm in the process of learning PowerShell and may be over thinking this, so feel free to tell me to get a life...

[Mike Resseler]

Jimbo,

I am not sure if I understand it correctly. You have a region (EMEA for example) that has its own B&R server. Then for each region, you want a protected VM restored to another location (other vCenter). Is that your aim? Is that other vCenter visible/ connected to the same B&R server?

[jimbo_wa]

Thanks Mike - yes, the idea is to move a single VM from one vCenter to another (vCenters are not linked) within a region as a one off job.

The regional B&R server would temporarily connect to each vCenter for the duration of the migration, before then moving onto the next move job that will be a different VM/vCenters.

[Mike Resseler]

In that case, I would indeed go for the PowerShell way of working. I don't think I ever saw such a script, but it doesn't seem like a big issue. Also I can't think of any gotcha's for the moment