VDRO without vCenter Connection

[KBC-LR]

Hi,

We are currently testing a decoupled environment with VRO to have a clean environment for the VMs to boot in case of ransomware. This means that there should be no VPN connection between On-Premises and Azure - only the Azure Blob should be supplied via VBR.

This means on-premises is a VBR 12 and a classic ESXi cluster with several VMs. VMs are copied via backup copy job in an Azure Blob Repo.

A VRO 6 is installed in Azure. Now when I configure the "Coud Recovery Locations" in the VRO, I need to connect a vSphere cluster to recover VMware VMs. After consulting with our Veeam Engineers, this is necessary to establish the IP address mapping between vSphere and Azure vNET.

Is there a way to do the network mapping vSphere VM to Azure VM manually? We definitely don't want a connection between the two environments.

Another point I noticed during the installation, why does the server need to be in a domain?

BR LR

[Alec King]

VRO is designed to launch DR plans if vCenter is down/offline (in fact it's a core scenario), so if you can connect the vCenter to VRO just for the initial creation and configuration of the network mappings, you can then remove the vCenter connection afterward. (network info is stored in the restore point metadata)
You will get warnings in readiness checks that the source vCenter is down, however the restore plan will execute OK.

Regarding domain membership, it has historically been a requirement. However we plan to remove this in an upcoming version and allow installation to a workgroup server too.

Cheers,
Alec