vSphere, NetApp and Replication Options

[mplep]

Hi,

We are looking at the options available for an infrastructure refresh and would welcome some advice.

We have a vSphere environment with Live and DR hosted between two data centers. We utilise Veeam (Enterprise) for backups, backup copies and also to replicate the workloads from Live to DR. We don't have Storage Integration available, so do experience some pain with VM snapshots. We have differing requirements for VMs regarding RPO and functionality like SureReplica is important. The features available in the recently released Veeam Availability Orchestrator are of interest.

Our refresh will most likely utilise NetApp FAS, NFS, 10Gb for storage at each site, with SnapMirror licensing included. This opens up new possibilities for us which I'm exploring.

Storage Integration will be great for backup and recovery, but what about replication? The idea of SnapMirror providing fast, low impact storage replication between sites seems great at first glance.

But we are used to having VMs ready for instant invocation in DR courtesy of Veeam. SnapMirror needs SRM to achieve comparable functionality?

Research provided the topic below was very informative, but is three years old now. Have things changed much, is it now possible to replicate from a Storage Snapshot for example?

vmware-vsphere-f24/should-i-use-snapmir ... 29888.html

Thanks in advance..

MP

[foggy]

Yes, replication jobs can be configured to use storage snapshots as a source as well (only on primary storage though).

[skrause]

If you are only running on Enterprise, you won't be able to utilize any primary storage integrations. That requires Enterprise Plus licensing.