OK To Clone a Proxy VM?

[ViciousXUSMC]

I have a primary site and a DR site.

Recently I stood up a proxy server on the primary site and it helped manage max concurrent tasks, and also we saw speed improvements with replication.
I see the replication jobs could also make use of a proxy on the other side of the network at the DR site.

Is it OK to clone the proxy server I already have built and just change the hostname/IP and then add it to Veeam as an additional proxy? Or, would this maybe cause some issues as there could be configuration data within Veeam on the proxy server that would make building it from a fresh Windows template a better idea?

Thank You,

[DGrinev]

Yes, you can do this, since the proxy server components are the same.
All the configuration data located on the management server, which is Backup Server. Thanks!

[Gostev]

I am not so sure. I remember how cloning backup proxies resulted in some major issues with hot add on some ESXi versions, for instance - because multiple cloned VMs confused VDDK.

[AlexB82]

It's not that difficult to deploy a new VM and have Veeam install the proxy for you...

It would be a good idea to at least sysprep the clone if you do that (or use the VMware Customisation Scripts) - not great having multiple machines on the domain with the same SIDs

[ChuckS42]

Yah, I've done this several times. No problems recently. (There was a thing with VDDK a while ago, but I don't think that's a thing any more.) Since switching to Nutanix we aren't using hotadd any more, so it's simpler.

[bdufour]

i wouldnt clone it if you still plan on having it at the primary site...u are going to run into problems with having duplicate SIDs on your network (you dont want that)..if you plan on cloning, then decommissioning the one at the primary site that could be fine.

[tsightler]

The only case where cloning a proxy is likely to cause a problem is with hotadd. I'm not 100% sure that this issue still exist, but certainly, in the past, having a duplicate BIOS UUID would create havoc with hotadd causing difficult to diagnose failure cases, and so best practice is to simply not do this.