The Veeam Cookbook Series

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

Recipe: Create a VMware Replication Job with Mapping

Expected deliverables:

A Veeam Replication Job to replicate VMware VMs from a source ESXi host to a target ESXi host, by leveraging existing VM replicas on the target datastore.

Time to complete: 5 minutes

Ingredients:

• Virtual 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.
• One Backup Proxy for onsite replication scenario or two Backup Proxies for offsite replication scenario.
• Backup repository for replica metadata. Deduplicating appliances and Scale-out Backup repositories aren’t supported.
• Valid Replica VMs in the offsite backup repository.

Before you start:

The target datastore must have enough free space to store disks of replicated VMs.

Assumptions:

It’s assumed that you already have a Veeam Backup Server fully working in your environment. If you need to install Veeam Backup Server, please refer to “Installing Veeam Backup & Replication All-In-One Base system” recipe.

Method:

1. Open the Veeam Backup & Replication Console.
2. On the Home view. On the ribbon, click Replication Job > Virtual machine > VMware vSphere.
3. At the Name step of the wizard, specify a job name and description. Select the Replica seeding (for low bandwidth DR sites) checkbox. Click Next.
4. At the Virtual Machines step, select VMs and/or VM containers (hosts, clusters, folders, resource pools, VirtualApps, datastores or tags) that you want to replicate. Click Add, then in the Add Object window select the necessary VMs or VM containers and click Add. Click Next.
5. At the Destination step, select a target host or cluster, resource pool, folder and datastore for replicas. Click Next.
6. 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).
7. At the Data Transfer step, select the Source and Target proxy servers (recommended for offsite replication) or leave Automatic selection (default). Leave Direct option selected and click Next.
8. At the Define Seeding and Mapping Settings step, check Map replicas to existing VMs and use one the following options:
   • Click Detect to autodiscover existing copies of VMs that you plan to replicate
   • Select an original VM from the list and click Edit if you want to map a VM manually
   • Select a VM associated with a replica and click Remove to remove the mapping. When done, click Next.
9. At the Guest Processing step, keep Enable application-aware processing option unchecked. If you need Guest Processing please refer to the “Create a VMware Replication Job with Guest Processing for Windows VMs” or “for Linux VMs” recipe. Click Next.
10. At the Schedule step of the wizard, select to run the replication job manually or schedule the job to run on a regular basis.
11. At the Summary step of the wizard, 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:

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

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