The Veeam Cookbook Series

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Recipe: Create a VMware Replication Job with Guest Processing for Windows 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:

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

Before you start:

The target datastore must have enough free space to store disks of replicated VMs. Due to a change in ESXi 6.0 Update 1, replication and quick migration to VVol datastores are not possible with either Veeam or native VMware vSphere replication.

Assumptions:

It’s assumed that you already have a Veeam Backup Server fully working in your environment. It’s assumed that Windows VMs included in this job support Microsoft VSS.

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 , specify a job name and description. Leave other options by default and 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, vm 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).
   • 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.
8. At the Guest Processing step, check Enable application-aware processing option:
   • If it’s required, choose a specific Guest Interaction Proxy, otherwise leave the default 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.
   • If you want to configure transaction log processing for MS Exchange, SQL, Oracle or PostgreSQL, click in Applications, then select a workload from the list and click in Edit. In the Processing Settings windows configure the parameters according to your requirements.
   • 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, 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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