Seeding via USB Drive - Veeam Server at DR Site

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Client is setup with 2 sites. Primary and DR. The Veeam replication server is located at the DR site. The vCenter server is at the Primary site. We are replicating servers from the Primary site to the DR site and located the Veeam replication server at the DR site per Veeam's recommendation to increase performance by pulling the replication jobs instead of pushing them across.

We are migrating to a new vCenter server and now need to set all of this up again. The first time we did this we didn’t seed the replication jobs with a USB drive and it took forever. This time we want to seed them.

My question is this: If we attach the USB drive to a Windows server at the Primary site and share it out, and then setup the replication jobs on the Veeam server at the DR site and tell it to seed the job at that share, will it work? Or will Veeam pass data back and forth across the WAN link? I need the proper procedure to set this up for them. If the Veeam server was at the Primary site this would be clear to me but since the Veeam server is at the DR site on the other side of the WAN link from the ESXi hosts, it’s not clear on what the proper procedure to do this is.

[Gostev]

Seeding is not possible with backup server installed in the target site for the reasons you have mentioned above. We are addressing this in the next release.

As a workaround, I can suggest to perform first replication locally to ESX(i) located in the source site, download and move VM files to target site on USB storage, upload them to target ESX(i) datastore, and update replication job settings to choose the new ESX(i) in the target site. Keep in mind that currently you can only use thick disks when performing seeding via USB storage, because VMDK disks leave VMFS during the process, while thin disks can only exist within VMFS. Thanks.

[anbeca]

Hi

can I do an export with vSphere Client (ova) and import it on the DR site and then use this vm for incremental replication?

[Vitaliy S.]

I guess so... at least I do no see why it shouldn't work. On top of that, you can use Veeam to perform initial seeding for your replica VM. Here is the corresponding topic with our instructions to follow.