The Veeam Cookbook Series

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

Recipe: Create a VMware Replication Job with Seeding

Expected deliverables:

A Veeam Replication Job to replicate VMware VMs from a source ESXi host to a target ESXi host, by leveraging existing backups on the offsite backup repository.

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
• Valid backups of all the Replica VMs in the offsite backup repository. If a VM has missing backups, it will be skipped from processing.

Before you start:

The target datastore must have enough free space to store disks of replicated VMs. The offsite repository cannot be a scale-out backup repository.

Assumptions:

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

Method:

1. On the Home view. On the ribbon, click Replication Job > Virtual machine > VMware vSphere.
2. At the Name step , specify a job name and description. Select the Replica seeding (for low bandwidth DR sites) checkbox. Click Next.
3. 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.
4. At the Destination step, select a target host or cluster, resource pool, vm folder and datastore for replicas. Click Next.
5. 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).
6. 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.
7. At the Define Seeding and Mapping Settings step, check Get seed from the following backup repository and select the repository where your replica seeds are stored. Click Next.
8. At the Guest Processing step, keep Enable application-aware processing option unchecked. If you need Guest Processing please refer to:
   • Create a VMware Replication Job with Guest Processing for Windows VMs
   • Create a VMware Replication Job with Guest Processing for Linux VMs
   • Click Next.
9. At the Schedule step, select to run the replication job manually or schedule the job to run on a regular basis.
10. 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:

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

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