Question around replica recocery

[Rosco]

Hi, am pretty new to VEEAM but have inherited a setup with one vCenter with two datacenters (Prod and DR) and each datacenter has a Veeam 9.0 server. The Prod side is backing up and replicating 20 VMs to the DR site whilst the DR Veeam server is just backing up a few non-prod VMs located there.

I want to test the replicas to represent a Prod site outage but when I goto into restore on the DR site Veeam server and select recover from replica, there is no mention of the VMs replicated by the Veeam server in the prod site, it's almost as if it does not know of it existence. I would have assumed it (the DR server) would see the replicas managed by the prod Veeam server.

Are executing restores only possible from the Veeam server configured to replicate them as if so then this server would need to be in the DR site not the prod site its supposed to be be protecting as if it was a real site outage, the prod server would be unavailable and we would only have the DR server which does not see any replicas if this makes sense?

I've read through the manual here https://helpcenter.veeam.com/archive/ba ... lback.html but cant find any mention of prod and dr instances of Veeam servers.

Thanks for any insight

[DGrinev]

Hi Rosco and welcome to the community.

You cannot perform failover or any other operations for those replicas from the DR site backup server as they managed by your production backup server.
That’s why, I’d recommend you to move all replication jobs to the DR site. That’s how you’ll get autonomy in case of disaster/outage on the production site. Also, as you already have replicas on the DR site, you can use Replica Mapping for fast and simple re-creating replication jobs.

To execute restore of the production backups on the DR site, you need to import them to the backup server. Here is a guide on how to perform backup import. Another way to import backups to the DR backup server: add the repository used for the production backups and start rescanning process.

Finally, please review existing thread about best practices for Replication.

Thanks!