How do you case leverage Veeam to replicate your View setup

[vpock]

Hey guys,

I was wondering how the rest of the Veeam community did leverage VB&R for backup and replication of Vmware Horizon View.

Right now, for all my customer, I create a separate View Composer/Connection Server/Security Server at the DR site. VMware does not support (At least in 5.x) multi-site View environments. I use Veeam strictly to copy the "templates" to the DR site, and recompose from there.

I obviously backup all the Composer/Connections/Security servers using Veeam.

Any of you doing things differently?

[dellock6]

Before joining Veeam I designed a couple of large VDI environment (View/Horizon 5.1 at that time), and we only took care of management VMs (vCenter, Composer, Connection...) and the source VMs. Also, we always used floating pools and non persistent VMs, so the only other VM to take care of was the file server holding all roaming profiles.
I've never seen other way to do this, unless there are some dedicated VMs involved. but those are not usually linked clones, and as such they can be protected as regular "server" VMs.

Luca.

[DavoudTeimouri]

Hi all,
I'm going to prepare a plan for our VDI backup. I know, Veeam BR doesn't support independent disks and can't create backup from the disks.
Is there any other solution to take backup from the persistent disks? Can we deploy linked-clone without independent disks?

[unsichtbarre]

I need to be able to replicate VMware Horizon View Linked Clones, or at least the user disk where the profile is supposed to reside?

THX,

-J

[veremin]

Hi, John,

Take a look at some considerations provided above; might be helpful.

Thanks.

[fll]

Hello, is there any way to backup Veeam from a pool linked clone of Horizon View with persistent disks?

Thanks!

[DGrinev]

Hello,

Please read this existing discussion above, it should be helpful. Thanks!

[sixarm]

Hi there,

What's the best way to replicate my Horizon View Template VMs from Production to DR using Veeam B&R?

A little background, I have a Horizon View pod at production which is using non-persistent Linked Clone desktops for our users. These desktops are based off two template VMs. When I say template, they aren't actually VMware Templates at all, they are just standard Virtual Machines which are updated, have a snapshot taken, and then rolled out to the Linked Clones via Horizon. These are often to referred to as Golden Images.

At the the DR end I have a second Horizon View pod, which I need to be able to see the template replicated from production to then roll out to a load of desktops at DR that will sit there unused only to come live if I need to invoke DR.

The "Golden Image" VMs are generally left powered off as they don't need to take up any compute resource.

I set up a replication job in B&R so the VMs are replicated to DR, however because they are powered off the first time I ran the job it finished within minutes and didn't actually transfer any data, although it did create the VMs at the DR end. When you look at the raw VM files, the VMDKs are tiny, not the 35GB you'd expect. I then powered one of the VMs on and re-ran the job and it replicated data over.

Q1: Will replication only work with powered on VMs?

Q2: How are other users handling these types of VMs when replicating to a DR site for a 2nd Horizon deployment?

Thanks in advance.

[sixarm]

Thanks for the merge. I did actually read this post prior to posting and it didn't fully answer the question.

Of course I want to copy my template VMs to my DR site, but what I still don't understand is the best way to achieve this within Veeam B&R?

I tried a VM Copy Job to a specific host, which gets the data over there, but there's still a manual process of having to register the VM to the host, change the virtual networking etc. Is there a better way?

[homerjnick]

What is the recommended way to backup/replicate the Persistent Disks on a Linked Clone in Horizon View if you use Veeam as your backup solution?

Because as I understand it...you can't...independent disks cannot be backed up or replicated by Veeam.

[DGrinev]

Hi Nick,

Please review this thread, it contains useful information. Thanks!

[homerjnick]

I've read this thread...doesn't seem to answer the question though.

[DGrinev]

I'll try to get useful information related to the Horizon View protection by Veeam and come back soon.
Meantime, you can review the old topic with the similar questions, if you didn't see it yet: Vmware view. Thanks!

[DGrinev]

Hi,

Unfortunately, we have no recommendations for protecting Horizon type environment, since we don't officially support it. Thanks!

[ChuckS42]

Backing up some VDI base images for Horizon. Three of them back up fine, but seem to think they have stuck shapshots that cannot be deleted. I have verified that their disks are not still attached to a proxy server, and they do in fact have snapshots, but they are not stuck or anything (none from Veeam). How do I convince Veeam that there's nothing wrong with these VMs?

This is a normal backup job, except that CBT is turned off (the image VMs are powered off).

[DGrinev]

Hi Chuck,

Unfortunately, Veeam officially don't support the Horizon View protection, so I cannot give you advice on any issues related to this environment. Thanks!