VMware Essentials and Veeam Backup Essentials

[HyperNetworks]

Hi,
i have no experience with VMware / Veeam, maybe you can help me.
As far as i know I can use in a small business environment a VMware Essentials Licence and run VMware on two Hardware hosts.
Is it possible to replicate a VM between the hosts with Veeam Image Based Replication, like in Hyper-V Replica?

Kind regards, Bernd

[foggy]

Hi Bernd, from your basic description of your environment I do not see why this would not be possible.

[J1mbo]

Yes it works, however vCentre (if you use it) will moan about duplicate MAC addresses.

[dellock6]

That's expected, as the machine is cloned also in its vmx configuration file. But as soon as the vm is powered on, vcenter will change dynamically the mac address to a new one, pseudo-random generated a usual.

[J1mbo]

It would be useful for the change not to happen, as of course the network stack then defaults to DHCP on Windows (or not enabled on RedHat I guess).

[dellock6]

The change cannot be prevented, as there cannot be two VMs with the same mac address in the network, that's why vcenter is forcing a change in the second one.
What you refer to is an issue only in some versions of Windows 2008 R2, that can be fixed with a patch. Newer versions like 2012 and above are not affected:
https://www.veeam.com/kb1570

for Linux, you can set the interface configuration to simply ignore the mac address, for example in CentOS 5-6 you can remove the HWADDR=<MAC-address> line from ifcfg files. If you look around in the forums there are many discussions and proposed solution to make it work even with mac changes.

[J1mbo]

Thank-you. Interesting that this bug still hasn't been fixed in stable, 7 years after the hotfix release.