Cloning of vmdk's

[Nobody]

Hey

We have a request we currently don't know how we should do this.
I was wondering if anybody out there has the same requirement and wan't to share or have a idea how to solve this.

We have a few applications where we need to copy all data from production to the stage environment.
All of the data we need to transfer is located at a own disk / vmfs file.

So currently we manualy copy the vmfs and add the copy to the stage system.
This is needing a long time, as we are talking about ~5 TB of data and it is a manual work we have to do mainly on the weekend.

So we thought, lets do Veeam the Job for us - but we found no way to do this.

Should be simple in my opinion:
- Snapshot of Prod
- Copy all changed blocks from prod to stage
- Remove Snapshot

So we could run a scheduled full sync during night and the secondy incremental sync for the cloning.

How would you do this with Veeam? Or is this not possible today and worth a Enhancement Request?

Best regards
Nobody

[larry]

You could setup a replica job, only the disks you want. To use on other VM vmfs file just remap the replica disks to the VM using for testing. It the data on the disks will change during your testing then snapshot the replica first, map disks, do tests, unmap disk from other VM, delete snapshot. Only change blocks of the disks will need to be copied each night. You can also copy the vmfs file to other VMs if needed but would do the whole 5tb each night. I have use this when a server died during a patch wiping the c: drive. I then just copied the C: drive from backup to production leaving all the data disks in place, server reboots like nothing has happened all data saved.