The Veeam Cookbook Series

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

Recipe: Create a CDP Policy with Guest Processing for Windows VMs

Expected deliverables:

A CDP Policy to provide Continous Data Protection for mission-critical VMware virtual machines (Windows) 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 at least 1 vCenter instance, a Source and a Target vSphere Cluster.
• I/O filters for CDP must have been installed in source and target vSphere Cluster.
• We recommend you to configure at least two VMware CDP proxies: one (source proxy) in the production site and one (target proxy) in the disaster recovery site.
• No specific requirement for VMs to be protected with CDP.
• Network between infrastructure components required for CDP must be minimum 1 Gbps. We recommend to use 10 Gbps or faster and MTU 900
• 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.
• CDP works only for powered on VMs

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 CDP Policy > 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 Policy Settings step, select the VMware CDP proxies (recommended) that must be used for the CDP policy, or leave it in automatic. Also specify which suffix to add to replica names.
   • Click Choose next to the Source proxy field if you want to select VMware CDP proxies in the production site
   • Click Choose next to the Target proxy field if you want to select VMware CDP proxies in the production site.
7. At the Schedule step, configure the schedule and retention policies.
   • Set the required Recovery point objective (RPO) in seconds or minutes.
   • Set the Short-term retention in hour or minutes.
   • Set the Long-term retention: Frequency to create restore points in hours, and retention for those restore points in days.
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 Summary step, review details of the CDP Policy. If you want to start the job right after you close the wizard, select the Enable the policy 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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