Veeam VCSA migration/replication

[jpipx]

In production scenarios I've used VMotion to migrate VCSA to other VSphere servers without fail. In my devel Essentials network I don't have that option so I tried both Veeam migration or replication and in both instances the process fails after the B&R v10 software shuts-down the source VCSA VM and then subsequently loses contact to it. Has anyone else run into this and found a work-around? I've seen posts saying that it can be done but none reporting this behavior. Seems to make sense but then how to do this? Thanks.

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums.

How did you register your vSphere environment to your Veeam backup server? Is it possible that you added the VCenter? Because during quick migration, we need to run commands against VMware (VCenter or ESXi hosts) and if the VCenter is shutdown, then it's hardly possible to run more commands against it

So the workaround would be to register the ESXi servers directly instead of the VCenter. As for replication, you could also to the failover manually on one of the ESXi hosts. It's "just a VM with snapshots". Don't forget to clean up the workarounds. Double registration can lead to unwanted side effects (licensing issues, failed backups etc. depending on your configuration)

Best regards,
Hannes

[jpipx]

Hello Hannes... Yes, I did register VCenter and not the individual hosts. Should I replace VCenter with the hosts or just add the hosts to my Veeam environment? Thanks.

[HannesK]

Hi,
You can try to delete the VCenter...

We built some safety nets into the software - it will prevent from deleting things that are still in use

Best regards,
Hannes

[jpipx]

Thanks Hannes. I was able to add the two discrete servers in addition to the vcenter being present and it worked. I was able to successfully failover to the replica and then return, worked great.