VM files after replica commit

[jlaco1]

Hello. We have just purchased VEEAM Backup and Replication 5 and I am testing out the replication functionality.

I recently read the comprehensive post outlining the steps in which you are supposed to use to "commit" a replica after you failover to it. I am testing out the process and everything works fine except for all of the newly committed replica vm files in my new datastore have the "_replica" still appended to them. Is there any way to have those files named back to the production name of the VM?

Also, it seems like there should be an option in the the application to commit these failed over replicas. Is there a wizard or automated process of some sort that I am missing? If not, is it being considered for future versions? Thanks!

[Gostev]

Hello.

Well, I guess you could shut down the VM, unregister it from inventory, edit all file names manually (you can do that right from Veeam Backup, by browsing under Servers tree), then also edit VMX to point to newly renamed files (you can also do that from Veeam directly, same place, there is built-in file editor available). Then, register the VM again with inventory. Should work! But please, be sure to back the VM up before doing this though. Again, with Veeam

And yes, replica re-homing option is already implemented in the upcoming v6 release (Q4). In fact, v6 is full of major replication enhancements - this one is arguably most minor feature we have added.

Thanks!

[jlaco1]

Thanks for the quick reply Gostev! That is some extra work but I'll give it a shot. The fact that the replica re-home option is in v6 is good news. I assume the option will follow the manual process but will be automated by the software. One concern I have regarding the current re-homing process is the amount of time it takes to move the VM files from one datastore to the other. We currently don't have a storage vMotion license. I am doing my testing with a VM that is about 100gb in size. The production SQL server(sql 2005, win2003 R2 Enterprise 64) I am thinking about using replication on is 4.4 tb of disks all sitting on VMFS volumes. The replica commit cleanup steps for this vm would take a pretty long time. Now that I have the basic idea of how VEEAM Backup and Replication works, I will start reading up on SQL best practices for VEEAM. Do you know of any good posts or documents(besides the veeam manual). Thanks again!

[Gostev]

Ah, you missed a big webinar with outside SQL expert about this earlier this week... but here is the recording.

Top 5 mistakes in backing up virtual SQL Servers with Brent Ozar
http://go.veeam.com/webinar-top-5-mista ... -ozar.html

This one is still coming though.

Advanced SQL Server backups & recovery for VM environments
http://www.veeam.com/webinars/advanced- ... ments.html

[jlaco1]

Sweet. Thanks again Anton!

[chrisdearden]

I seem to remember a storage vmotion or cold migrate can be used to rename VMDK files to match the VM name.