VMware Cloud Director to Vcenter Replication

[crackocain]

Hello

Some customers are in cloud and they access only Vmware Cloud Director. These customers want to migrate new datacenter or want to protect virtual machines own location.

So they need VCD to Vcenter replication feature. How do they achieve that?

Thank you.

[Andreas Neufert]

At the vCD, do the Customer has admin access to the vcenter backend?

[crackocain]

No. Customer has tenant access.

[Andreas Neufert]

Then rollout agents (Protection Group) on the workload and backup them regularly until you have every one. At migration day, you can shutdown the VMs, backup again and create instant restores to VMware on the vSphere side.

You can even try it before while booting the VMs without network and shuting down the instant restore.

As well I would setup a small VM for testing the whole procedure.

[crackocain]

Thanks Andreas. Of course, the backup option is always on the table, but it prolongs the process too much.

Customers are going to use hybrid cloud. That's why we encounter cloud to on premise replication requests a lot. Will there be a feature update for this?

[Andreas Neufert]

You can replicate vCD to vsphere today, but you need to have access to both backend infrastructure and the needed backup rights.
VMware does not plan to give customers backup APIs on a vORG or vDC level, so we can not use image level backup.

I am not so sure what you mean that it would delay anything. You can backup to production storage to have the instant restore speed needed and you can setup maybe multiple vPOWER NFS servers with caches on the production storage to scale to multiple hundreds if not thousands of VMs. And it does not matter then if you do failover or instant restore, as in the end it is nearly the same around timing.

[crackocain]

Main reason is not all virtual machines are Veeam Agent for Linux compatible. So image level replication is mandatory.

VMware does not plan to give customers backup APIs on a vORG or vDC level, so we can not use image level backup.

This is critical. Vmware does not want someone who has entered Vcloud to even go to the Vsphere environment. What a pity. Oracle was dealing with such cheap things too.

[Andreas Neufert]

I don´t think that this is the case. It is about security, the tenant get the least amount of privileges on their environment for day to day operations without being able to harm the backend environment. For the Linux systems that are not on the OS supported list, you could maybe check for the "nosnap" processing which should work with way more Linux systems. https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/agent ... tml?ver=60

If this is not working you might create a snapshot of the VMs and mount the snapshot disks to a linux "helper" system that is supported and mount it in the filesystem. Then backup with VAL for the migration. Some manual work is needed at the target. Maybe a bad idea to do it that way, but just sharing ideas. The nosnap processing is the better approach for sure.

Alternatively speak with the the vendor that gives you the cloud, they might be able to backup the VMs once with Veeam and give you the backups on a changeable media or download option. There is a good chance that the partner uses Veeam in the background already.