Veeam Cookbook
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Recipe: Create a VMware Replication Job with Guest Processing
Expected deliverables:
A Veeam Replication Job to replicate VMware VMs from a source ESXi host to a target ESXi host with Guest application-aware processing enabled.
Time to complete: 5 minutes
Ingredients:
- vSphere infrastructure must have been added to the backup infrastructure and properly configured. That means adding source and target vSphere infrastructure, vCenter Server instances (recommended) or standalone ESXi hosts.
- At least one VMware Proxy Server for onsite replication scenario or two Backup Proxies for offsite replication scenario.
- A Backup Repository for replica metadata. Deduplicating appliances and Scale-out Backup repositories aren’t supported
- A user account with the required privileges if Guest Processing will be enabled
Before you start:
The target datastore must have enough free space to store disks of replicated VMs. Due to a change in ESXi 6.0 Update 1, replication and quick migration to VVol datastores are not possible with either Veeam or native VMware vSphere replication.
Assumptions:
You have a Veeam Backup and Replication server installed.
It’s assumed that Windows VMs included in this job support Microsoft VSS.
Method:
- Open the Veeam Backup & Replication Console.
- On the Home view. On the ribbon, click Replication Job > Virtual machine > VMware vSphere.
- At the Name step , specify a job name and description. Leave other options by default and click Next.
- At the Virtual Machines step, select VMs and/or VM containers that you want to replicate.
- Click Add, then in the Add Object window select the necessary VMs or VM containers and click Add.
- At the Destination step, select a target host or cluster, resource pool, vm folder and datastore for replicas. Click Next.
- At the Job Settings step, select a backup repository that will store metadata for VM replicas.
- In the Replica name suffix field, enter a suffix that will be added to the original VM names
- In the Restore points to keep field, specify the number of restore points that the job must maintain (Max 28).
- At the Data Transfer step:
- Select the Source and Target proxy servers (recommended for offsite replication) or leave Automatic selection (default).
- If you want to use WAN Acceleration, click in Through built-in WAN accelerators and select a Source and a Target WAN Accelerator.
- Otherwise, leave Direct option selected and click Next.
- At the Guest Processing step,
- Check Enable application-aware processing option.
- If you want to configure archive/transaction log processing for MS Exchange, SQL, Oracle or PostgreSQL, click Customize application-aware processing settings, then select a workload from the list and click Edit. In the Processing Settings windows configure the parameters according to your requirements.
- From the Guest OS credentials list, specify credentials that Veeam will use to access guest OSes of all VMs included into the backup scope.
- To check whether Veeam can connect to VMs using the specified guest OS credentials, click Verify network connectivity and credentials.
- Click Next.
- At the Schedule step, select to run the replication job manually or schedule the job to run on a regular basis.
- At the Summary step, review details of the replication job. If you want to start the job right after you close the wizard, select the Run the job when I click Finish check box, otherwise leave the check box unselected. Then click Finish to close the wizard
Links to Resources: