The Veeam Cookbook Series

A simple step by step no frills approach to achieving your goal

Recipe: Creating Failover Plans

Expected deliverables:

A failover plan, that allows to perform VM failover in precise order, with proper delay between VMs the power on, automatically.

Time to complete: 5 minutes

Ingredients:

• One or more replica VMs successfully replicated at least once.

Before you start:

The maximum number of VMs that can be started simultaneously when you run a failover plan is 10. If you want to execute custom scripts, you must create them before you configure the failover plan.

Assumptions:

It’s assumed that you already have a Veeam Backup Server fully working in your environment, and a DR site where replicas are already configured and ready.

Method:

1. Open the Veeam Backup & Replication Console.
2. On the Home view, on the ribbon, click ** Failover Plan > VMware vSphere**.
3. At the General step of the wizard, specify a job name and description. If you want to execute custom scripts before or after the failover plan, select the Pre-failover script and Post-failover script check boxes and click Browse to choose a supported file among BAT, CMD, EXE and PS1. Click Next.
4. At the Virtual Machines step, select VMs that you want to add to the failover plan. Click Add, choose From infrastructure or From replicas to browse the virtual environment or the existing replication jobs. You can also use the search fields.
5. Change the processing order by clicking the Up and Down buttons. VMs at the top of the list have a higher priority and will be started first.
6. Set the delay time for processing the VM in the list, by selecting it and clicking Set Delay on the right. Enter the time interval that you consider sufficient for this VM to boot. Click Apply when finished.
7. At the Summary step of the wizard, review details for the configured failover plan and click Finish to create the plan.

Links to Resources:

• Veeam Guides and Helpcenter
• Veeam Community Forums
• Veeam Best Practices

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