How to provide an updated copy of a VM daily?

[lrhazi]

Hello,

What you be the best way to provide this:
- Every day, provide a replica of a production VM. One which the user can use all day... then have it "resynced" again from the prod VM, the following day, say 5 am every day.

I like a lot what the VM Replication does, by only copying over changed blocks everyday... Can one use that? would it break if the replicat is found powered on, and lots of blocks have been modified since the previous run of the replication job? would it copy only changed blocks, or would it perform a full replication again?

Thanks,
Mohamed.

[foggy]

Hi Mohamed, if I understand you right, you need a daily updated replica of a production VM and this replica is used for some activity during the day. There should be no issues provided the replica VM is powered off at the moment the job starts. All disk changes performed while replica VM was running go into the new snapshot file and are discarded during the next job run, so nothing to worry about here. But consider using on-demand sandbox functionality for your use case.

[lrhazi]

Thanks foggy. In addition to the VM needing to be powered off.. am also getting this error:

12/12/2017 11:47:03 AM :: Processing scriptmgmt-2 Error: Cannot process the VM because the target VM state is failover.

Does that mean I need to "Undo Failover" or "Permanent Failover" ?

[lrhazi]

Then I guess I will need to figure out how to automate these tasks, right? Veeam replication job cannot do them for me?

[foggy]

Right, replication cannot work in case replica VM is in failover state. You do not need to perform a failover to do testing, you can just power the replica VM on manually using vSphere Client and then turn it off.