Replicate SAN to NFS using same hosts?

[sfens]

Hi,

I read in the FAQ that Veeam replication requires a standby host. This does not work for my situation, but I think I've come up with a workaround. I am seeking input to see if there's a better way for me to setup replication.

I have 2 VMware hosts and VMware essentials (not essentials plus). Both hosts are connected to a SAN. I manually split the VM's among the 2 hosts, but can migrate them to a different host if needed. (I would need to power off the VM first.) I have Veeam running backups to 1 NFS server (openfiler) and replicating to another NFS server (Ubuntu).

When I setup the replication, I had to pick a host as a target. Well I just picked the 2nd hosts. This works fine for VM's on the 1st host, since the target host is the 2nd host. For VM's on the 2nd host, the target is the 2nd host also. This doesn't really make sense, but I do get VM_replicas on the Ubuntu NFS datastore, which is really what I want. I can manually change the host for the replicas if I need to actually failover from SAN to NFS.

I obviously am loosing some functionality of Veeam, e.g. failover and failback. I would be working in the vSphere interface instead of the Veeam interface.

To fix this, could I setup 2 replication jobs, based on the location of each VM? So all VM's running on host1 would replicate to NFS and have a host target of host2, and all VM's running on host2 would replicate to same NFS and have a host target of host1. Does that seem like a plausible workaround?

[foggy]

If you want the replicas to reside both on different host and different datastore than the original VMs, then you can have two jobs, one per host, with the host added as a source and specify another host as target. This would allow you to keep all the failover/failback functionality within Veeam B&R console.