The Veeam Cookbook Series

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

Recipe: Create a VMware Replication Job with Guest Processing for Linux VMs

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:

• 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
• A user account with root privileges if Guest Processing will be enabled

Before you start:

The target datastore must have enough free space to store disks of replicated VMs. It’s assumed that you have supported Pre-freeze and Post-thaw scripts.

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. 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 Guest Processing step, check Enable application-aware processing option.
   • From the Guest OS credentials list, select a user account that has enough permissions. If you have not set up credentials beforehand, click the Manage accounts link or click the Add button to add credentials.
   • Click Applications, select a VM for which you want to configure scripts and then click Edit.
   • Click the Scripts tab and select Require successful script execution.
   • In the Linux scripts section, specify paths to scripts for Linux VMs (Pre-freeze and Post-thaw scripts).
   • Click OK twice.
   • To check whether Veeam can connect to VMs using the specified guest OS credentials and can deploy the non-persistent runtime components on the guest OSes, click Test Now. Click Next.
9. At the Schedule step of the wizard, select to run the replication job manually or schedule the job to run on a regular basis.
10. 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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