The Veeam Cookbook Series

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

Recipe: Performing Planned Failover

Expected deliverables:

The manual, smooth switch from a primary VM to its replica, with minimum interrupting in operation.

Time to complete: 5 minutes

Ingredients:

• One or more replica VMs successfully replicated at least once.
• VM replicas must be in the Ready state

Before you start:

Veeam Backup & Replication synchronizes the VM replica to the latest state of the production VM before failing over.

Assumptions:

It’s assumed that you already have a Veeam Backup Server fully working in your environment.

Method:

1. Open the Veeam Backup & Replication Console.
2. On the Home tab, click Restore and select VMware vSphere > Restore from replica > Entire replica > Planned failover to a replica.
3. At the Virtual Machines step, select VMs for which you want to perform failover. 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. Click Next to proceed.
4. At the Reason step of the wizard, enter a reason for failing over to VM replicas. Click Next.
5. At the Summary step, review details of the failover task and click Finish to start the failover process. Once planned failover is complete, VM replicas will be started on the target host.

Important: Failover is an intermediate step that needs to be finalized. You can finalize failover in the following way:

• Perform permanent failover
• Undo failover
• Perform failback

Links to Resources:

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

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