Thursday, August 19, 2010

Using Veeam backup to relocate VM's

Nope, I didn't fudge up the title.  Veeam Backup and Replication is a wonderful product, allowing you to replicate vSphere VMs to a offsite Disaster Recovery location.  When disaster strikes, it's a pretty straight-forward process to fail over to your DR site.  It's what I call a forehead procedure - you only have to hit the spacebar with your forehead.    Thanks - I'll be here all night!  

What's not so intuitive and well documented is using Veeam Backup to move VM's to a different location, for example a Server Room / Data Center relocation *and then commiting those changes*, i.e. not failing back to Production.  The below steps assume we've replicated and failed over our VM's to our DR location already.

Ruan's Step By Step Guide on using Veeam Backup to relocate VM's

  1. Delete all Veeam VM snapshots using the vSphere Snapshot Manager
  2. By default your DR replica will be named "VMname_replica", rename it back to its original name, i.e. VMname
  3. Remove the VM replica from the list of replicas in the Veeam Backup and Replication Console
  4. Delete the Production -> DR replication job responsible for replication the VM in question.  Recreate it to reflect the new Source and Target locations
  5. Delete the .vrb file from the VM datastore, as we will no longer be using these restore points
  6. Delete the replica.vrb and running.rbk files
  7. Pat yourself on the back - you've just done the easiest VM move you'll ever do!

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