Moving to new VM cluster - Veeam licencing?

[silus]

Hi,
We are in the process of moving to a completely new VMware platform.

At the moment we have veeam licenced for our hosts. We are planning a slow, staged migration onto the new platform.

We would like to continue to have the VMs backed up on the new hosts whilst we are in the process of moving the vms and retiring the old hosts.

Unfortunately I do not think we can just add in the new hosts as we do not have enough licences to back them up. Is it possible to add them on a 'temporary' license e.g a 30 day trial for the new hosts until we can move our existing licencing over?

Or can we set up a new veeam instance with some trial licenses for the new hosts and move some repos over and back up there for a few weeks? Are there any problems with 2 veeam instances connecting to the same vcentre server?

Any advice on this is appreciated, we'd rather not rush the migration in order to free up veeam licences on a host by host basis if we can avoid it.

Thanks.

[veremin]

Or can we set up a new veeam instance with some trial licenses for the new hosts and move some repos over and back up there for a few weeks?

According to the existing discussion, It’s not allowed to mix different types of Veeam licence within the same site/datacentre (physical location).

Are there any problems with 2 veeam instances connecting to the same vcentre server?

The most crucial one is that they are not aware about each other. This, in its turn, might lead to negative consequence when backup/replication activities of both servers overlap, etc.

From my perspective, the best option you have is to utilize Veeam replica functionality. In this case, it will guaranteed that all of your VMs will be moved successfully to newly-deployed hosts, and also that none of additional licence will be required (since, Veeam licence does care only about source side).

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[silus]

Luckily the new vm servers are not in the same physical building, because we are moving to a commercial datacentre which is very local to us (same business park but different building) so hopefully that doesn't break the eula.

Perhaps we could set up a new instance of Veeam on temporary license, and connect the new ESX servers to veeam directly and not via vcentre (in vmware they are currently in a new isolated cluster connected to the same vcentre server) so that we may still back these VMs up whilst we are migrating and we can then put our existing licencing in place.

Will look into the veeam replica, not heard about that so far

thanks

[foggy]

Will look into the veeam replica, not heard about that so far

Simon, probably the following topic will be helpful, please take a look: Using Veeam replication to Migrate Datacenter.

[veremin]

Luckily the new vm servers are not in the same physical building, because we are moving to a commercial datacentre which is very local to us (same business park but different building) so hopefully that doesn't break the eula.

Yep, if you trial licence has expired so far or you just haven't used one previously, you can follow with this scenario, since it seems to be totally feasible one.

However, I strongly recommend you to take a look at replication functionality that is likely to meet expectations, without any additional issues/headaches, etc. More information regarding it can be found in the corresponding User Guide (p.45).

Thanks.

[silus]

Thanks for the info.

So if I use Veeam Replication to move a VM from one host to another, what happens when that relocated VM needs to be backed up? As it will be on a new host which is then unlicensed with veeam until i've moved more vms and licenced the new hosts?

[foggy]

If waiting until all VMs are replicated and failing over the entire site is not the case, I believe, you can temporarily use trial version in the target site to backup VMs that are already failed over to their replicas. You can then switch the license to the new host after failing over the last VM.

[silus]

Great, thankyou, this could be a good solution.

Also, I am reading through the user guide for replication. Given that I have no requirement to keep 2 vms in sync (I will just need to move from one host & SAN to another host & SAN) and we intend to add the hosts into the same cluster as we have a fast link between the sites so can do s/vmotion, what are the benefits of me using Veeam Replication to achieve this rather than using vmotion/storage vmotion?

thanks for your help

[veremin]

Then, you should be ok with vMotion functionality.

However, don’t forget to exclude already moved VMs from existing backup jobs. Providing these VMs have been added to backup job through vCenter, backup job are vMotion aware. In other words, backup jobs know that corresponding VMs have been moved to another host.

Consequently, VB&R will try to backup such VMs that don’t reside any longer on a licensed host, and will fail with “lack of licence” error.

Thanks