automate replication placement

[liorme]

is it possible to automate replication placement? if you have a lot of hosts, and you want to replicate between them, you have to manually have a list of what is replicated to where. but is there a way to automate it? say, based on free resources or something?

meaning, when i create a replication job, veeam will select the destination based on this and that (whatever capable by veeam)

thank you

[soncscy]

Hey Lior,

If I remember correctly, if you select a cluster as the target location, Veeam will replicate to the first host in the list, and from there, the native VMware DRS handles the rest.

[liorme]

oh yeah, i see that. and what about a local storage based system? is there a solution there?

[soncscy]

As in tons of standalone hosts? Or what do you mean?

No, I think not as Veeam doesn't really do comparisons like that. I think what you'd want is a script that first checks in PowerCLI to see which host has the most free resources as you add a VM to a list, but honestly, this seems like you'd be repeating a lot and you're trying to get Veeam to to what DRS in a cluster should be doing. If I understand you right, this would mean a lot of full replications each time.

If you can explain what your set up is, a script shouldn't be too hard to make (Get a list of VMs on your host ignoring anything with _replica in it, when the script runs, check if there are any VMs returned that are not currently in a Replica Job. If yes, check all available hosts and pick the one with the most free resources, and then create a new veeam job for this VM(s) targeting that host, probably add in a check to ensure that the found host is not the VM's current host)

That of course will just be initial set up -- on-going load balancing I think just wouldn't make sense to control through Veeam, and it would be better to set up a proper cluster + DRS.