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swspjcd
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currently trialing the product and have a few questions.

Post by swspjcd »

I have been using VMBK (ugh!) for far too long now to do DR backups/replication of virtual servers and it's finally time to go with a better product so I am doing a trial of Veeam backup/replication. A brief description of our site: we have one virtual center server that manages 10 ESX hosts. 5 of those hosts live at our primary data center and the other 5 live at our secondary data center. Both sets of ESX hosts have live production servers and are all accessible via the network and across the SAN. The idea is to backup/replicate the virtual server from one site to the other site and vice-versa so in case of DR, the DR copies are powered on, and then an incremental restore is performed using TSM to bring them back to be as recent as possible. So worst case scenario, we only have to recover 1/2 of our virtuals since they are split between two physical sites. The data for the primary site lives on a Clariion CX3-80 and the data for the secondary site lives on a Clariion CX4-120. Both of storage devices are each connected to two Brocade 4900 switches. Each of the brocade switches is connected to the opposite site's brocade switch via a 2g dark fiber connection in an ISL configuration.

So here are my questions:
I don't have a machine built yet so I am unable to do the SAN replication but both network and SAN/nbd work although are a bit slow (fastest I can get is 19MB/s) but I believe that's a problem on our end. When I build a job to replicate all of the vms on one ESX host to an ESX host at the opposite site, what happens if one of those virtuals is vmotioned to a different host? Unless I'm looking at it incorrectly, it seems that if DRS were to vmotion a virtual server to try and load balance the ESX hosts, the previously built replication job wouldn't know where the virtual was running anymore and the job would have to be rebuilt again. Is this true? If we go with this product, I'm hoping to build a set of replication jobs and have them scheduled to run but if moving virtuals around between hosts is going to break the pre-made jobs, it becomes a bigger management issue.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
Gostev
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Re: currently trialing the product and have a few questions.

Post by Gostev »

Veeam Backup was built for virtual world from ground up so it supports VMotion since version 1.0... basically for us it does not matter which host specific VM is located right now - we memorize VM using unique ID (which is VMware recommended approach), and can find it no matter of its current location. The key is to populate Veeam Backup with vCenter server instead of individial ESX hosts, then we will be able to find VM on any host.
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