Can VMs still replicate changes during replica failover?

[akrietsch]

We currently have been using vSphere Replication and VMware SRM to replicate select VMs and orchestrate failover. Since we own Veeam B&R we were testing out their replication features. One thing I noticed in my testing is that when I do a failover of a replica, the associated Replication job will fail its next replication syncs. As soon as the failover is undone, replication resumes properly based on whatever the schedule is.

This might not work for our DR testing scenarios. At our second datacenter we have some legacy applications running on physical hardware that integrate with many of our virtual machines that we replicate. To test DR we failover our protected VMs to this second datacenter on to an isolated subnet that can't get out to our production datacenter. It is in this isolated network that our system admins can test the various integrations that the VMs need with the applications on the phyiscal hardware.

Long story short, these testing periods can last days, and I think some folks would get nervous that replication would have to stop while we are doing DR testing. With vSphere Replication it will continue replicating, so if you have a DR event while you happen to be testing with failed over VMs, you can simply initiate a cleanup of the failed over VMs and bring up new replicas that have the latest data based on whatever RPO is set.

Is there any way to continue replication while a VM is failed over? I realize our testing could be simplified if our tests were simply a planned failover and we ran our servers "live" out of our second datacenter for the testing period, but we are not there yet.

Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Alex,

No, that's not possible, since target VM has to be powered off if you want to continue running replication jobs. In your case you can add backup jobs to your configuration and run on-demand sandboxes for the production VMs, while your main replication jobs are still running.

Thanks!