Replication - identical hw or not ?

[JLundgren]

Hello,

a customer runs a server application which we plan to protect with replication.

However, the O.S. application license service creates some sort of checksum based on different hw components i.e. motherboard, MAC address etc.

Does the replicated vm consist of identical hw/same checksum, hence it will be possible to start up the application in a failover situation ?

[wishr]

Hi Johnny,

Hard to say. We utilize VMware snapshots when creating replicas so you may check with application vendor how do they handle such situations. The HW will be kept (note that VMX file checksum will ofc change), but we do not know how the application licensing service works in details. Personally, I'd recommend testing it.

Btw, what is a hardware checksum?

Thanks

[JLundgren]

Hello Fedor,

well, I don´t know in detail how it works but it is not uncommon that a application license-service calculates a checksum based on different hardware components, in this case virtual hardware.
If I remember correctly, a full vm restore creates hw with new hw-serialnumbers including new MAC-address.
Not sure about Veeam Replication but I think Veeam should be able to answer that ?

[wishr]

Dear Johnny,

We hope you understand that we are not able to answer how 3-rd party applications work, however, we can clearly answer any questions about our products.

During the replication, a replica will keep BIOS UUID and hardware device IDs of the source VM, but MAC addresses and VMX file will change. Since we do not know any details about how the 3-rd party license service work and the aforementioned "HW sum" calculation criteria, it's better to give it a try in the real world.

Hope it helps!

[JLundgren]

The fact that "During the replication, a VM will keep it's BIOS UUID and hardware device IDs, but MAC addresses and VMX file will change", is certainly valuable information to me.
Thanks.