VM Guest DR Testing

[mbeckey]

My company is going through our annual DR Tests for Tier 1 applications that are VM guest. We have replication jobs configured that go from our production data center to our DR site and the jobs run fine. Below are the steps that we take to failback the VM from the DR site to the Prod site. It takes a long time for the VM to replicate back to the Prod site we are able to process about 100 GB an hour. I was wondering if there was a better process that we can use to failback the guest without taking a down time for the server?

Failback process.
- Turn off the VM guest running at the DR site.
- Right click the Replica and select “Failback to Production”
- We run through the wizard and get a processing rate of about 100 GB an hour.
- Once the process is done we turn the guest on in the Prod VMware environment.

I was talking with a member of Veeam support last week and he mentioned that we should be able to leave the VM guest on at the DR site. Use the failback to production option and we shouldn’t see any downtime for guest to be moved back to the production site. Kind of like a VMotion affect. In doing some testing today I didn’t see that there was an outage during the process.

Thanks

[foggy]

It takes a long time for the VM to replicate back to the Prod site we are able to process about 100 GB an hour. I was wondering if there was a better process that we can use to failback the guest without taking a down time for the server?

During failback Veeam B&R needs to calculate and synchronize the differences between the original VM and the replica VM so the time required to scan the VM image depends on its size and is comparable to the full backup time of this VM. Be sure you have specified the repository at the source side to store replica metadata in the replication job as failure to do so could seriously affect failback operation performance. Also, proxy servers in source and target sites should be picked up during the failback wizard for optimal performance.

I was talking with a member of Veeam support last week and he mentioned that we should be able to leave the VM guest on at the DR site. Use the failback to production option and we shouldn’t see any downtime for guest to be moved back to the production site.

Correct, you can leave the replica VM running, it will be shut down automatically at the moment of final changes synchronization during failback operation.

[mbeckey]

Thanks for the reply Foggy.

Is there any documents from Veeam that outlines the different testing scenarios?

[foggy]

I believe you can find some in the Evaluator's Guide, available on the product web page, under Resources tab.