question about seeding VDP replicated vms

[phild]

im trying to setup the replication to our VPN connected DR site as per the following http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/80/v ... ng_vm.html

When it gets to the replica mapping, i cannot see the VMs that were backed up by VDP, so am i correct in thinking that the DR VMs have to be recovered from the datastore so Veeam can see them?

In that case, what is to stop the DR machines from then becoming live on the DR network, ok it wont contactable, but the IP will be still the same as the live site, or will the RE-IP rules fix this?

For Exchange, can we use the live Exchange server for the replication source instead of the backups, as we do Exchange backups nightly and need replication every 4 hours.
is there any downside to using live servers as the source for replication?

thanks

phil

[foggy]

Phil, yes, to be able to map replication jobs to existing VMs, they should be registered at the target host. No need to turn them on, however. Re-IP rules are applied on failover and will adjust network settings correspondingly.

Of course you can replicate the live VM, this was what everyone was doing prior version v8, when replication from backup became available. This however incurs snapshotting the original VM with all the consequences that entails.

[phild]

thanks foggy

when we were doing live replication with vmware, we did notice that the SQL machines dropped the client/server connection for a few seconds whilst running the snapshots.
So if we do extra backups during working hours, and replicate from backups, will that also have the same affect as snapshots, where we drop the connection for a few seconds, or does Veeam handle it differently?

i have read up on it, but had chance to try it yet in live.

thanks

[foggy]

Yep, you will most likely observe similar stuns as this is typical for snapshot commit operations. This is not related to Veeam B&R, but to how snapshots work - you can reproduce it without Veeam B&R in action, by creating a snapshot manually using vSphere Client, giving it some time to grow, and then removing it. Here's a huge thread discussing this as well as some tips on how to eliminate this effect.