Replication and Restore: Hardware Dependencies

[alexander89]

Dears,

I´m currently planning an infrastructure containing two sites and have some questions regarding the planned Veeam setup.

• Primary Site: 2 x ESXi Hosts (HA-Cluster), 1 x AF Storage

• Second Site: 1 x Backup Server, 2 x ESXi Hosts (HA-Cluster), 1 x HDD storage

Production workloads will run on site 1, whereas site 2 is only used for backup and DR.
The hardware (ESX, Storage) in site two is not identical to site 1 (old hosts, old storage).
Hardware is connected via 10g iSCSI. For site-interconnect 25g is used.

My questions are:
1. Can I use Veeam Replication jobs to replicate VMs from site 1 to site 2 regardless of the differences in hardware? Or does source- and target hosts need to be identical in hardware?
1a. If I use Veeam Socket based licensing, do I only need to buy licenses for CPUs in site 1 or do I also need to consider DR hardware used in Site 2?
2. If not using replication jobs, can I restore VMs from backup-files from the backup-server to the infrastructure on site 2, if site 1 crashes?

Thank you very much for your help.
Best regards,
Alex

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Alex.
1. Yes. vSphere version is what matters, as target must be equal or higher version of source. Hardware does not matter.
2. Yes, only source infrastructure needs to be licensed(aka one we retrieve data from). However, note that some features might require DR site hosts being licensed(for example Failback operation treats DR site hosts as source).
3. Yes, recovery from backups is free, no matter of target.

/Cheers!

[alexander89]

Hey Egor,

thanks for the fast response! I just have two questions back .

2. I´m not sure if I understand "failback operation" correctly.
Am I correct that in this scenario, if a crash happens and site 2 VMs become active, after solving the issues I will probably want to restore VMs again in primary site and one way of achieving this is via Veeam Failback Operations which requires hosts in site 2 to be Veeam licensed? (Sorry for the long sentence)

3. Ok great. But my question aimed for the hardware requirements again. But if replication works between different hardware, I guess restoring actions also do , correct?

Thank you, cheers, Alex

[Egor Yakovlev]

Sure.
- That sounds exactly like you said. It's been a while since my last touch on Veeam licensing, and I might be wrong on this one - it will be best to double check with sales representatives here.
- Yes, restore from backup hardware does not matter either.

/Cheers!

[alexander89]

Ok Egor, great. Thank you very much for your help!
Best, Alex

[Andreas Neufert]

For 1) The VM Hardware Version need to be supported at target. You can replicate from newer vSphere to older vSphere if the selected VM Hardware Version is supported.

[alexander89]

Thanks Andreas for your feedback.

I also received some interesting insights regarding failback, in case anybody´s interested:
If one needs to execute a failback and initial target infrastructure becomes source infrastructure, one can simply move the license from cluster 1 to cluster 2 and vica versa.
So summarized, no need to buy licenses for target infrastructure, only source.

Best, Alex

[Andreas Neufert]

This is correct, we license only the source.