Veeam Backup & Replication Off-Site Replication Walkthrough Tutorial

There are many possible options and steps in creating an off-site replication job (or even a local on-site job!) with Veeam. Below we have outlined one example that we might setup for our clients who are doing off-site replication with Veeam.

Step 1:

Regarding the three options at the bottom of the screen:

Low connection bandwidth (enable replica seeding)

This allows you to replicate to a pre-existing copy of the VM at the DR side. If this option is enabled, you will have additional options on the 6th config screen where you can select your source and destination VMs. Please do not select this option for a full, new seed.

• Separate virtual networks (enable network remapping)
  This option allows you to pre-configure the network adapter settings as the DR site will likely have something different than the source environment. Without this option you would need to edit the VM settings at the DR and modify its network configuration for the vLan that it will operate on. If you don't make this selection Veeam will try to place the VM on a network that doesn't exist based on the network name at your source environment. This will cause a failure. On the 4th edit screen you must select the appropriate source and destination networks. Otherwise the job will fail.
• Different IP addressing scheme (enable re-IP)
  This will allow you to pre-configure the IP address that will be configured on the VM at the DR when it is booted. This requires VMware Tools on the VM. This option is often unused as some folks prefer scripting the process of configuring network settings at the DR site.

Step 2:

• Add the VM or VMs for the replication job. Additionally, you can specify VM exclusions if you select to replicate an entire VMware cluster or resource pool. This is also where you can select specific VM disk exclutions.

Step 3:

All four options must be set in this window.

• Host or cluster:
  Select the host or cluster to replicate to.
  
• Resource pool:
  Select the resource pool for the replicated VM to be placed in. This is important as you likely only have permission to access your own resource pool(s).

• VM folder:
  Select the VM folder for the replicated VM to be placed in. Like the resource pool mentioned above, this is important as you likely only have permission to access your own VM folder(s).
  
• Datastore:
  Select the datastore that the VM will be stored on.

Step 4:

This step only applies if "Separate virtual networks (enable network remapping)" was selected in Step 1.

• Source Network:
  Select the network at the source environment that the VM is on. If this is left unset or set wrong the job will fail.
  
• Target Network:
  Select the network at the destination that the VM will be on. If this is left unset or set wrong the job will fail.

Step 5: Data Transfer

• Source Proxy:
  This is the proxy server at the source VM environment. I've found the auto function to be hit or miss so I would recommend always specifying manually.
  
• Target Proxy:
  This is the proxy server at the destination/DR. It is almost always the Veeam server itself if it's running from the destination location. As above, I would recommend specifying it manually.
  
• Repository for replica metadata:
  This is a staging area and it's also used for caching data for dedupe. This is almost always on the Veeam server so "Default" is our typical option.
  
• Replica Settings:
  "Replica name suffix" allows to append to the original VM name. "_replica" is the default but it can be changed. "Restore points to keep" allows for multiple job retention similar to backup operations.
  
• Advanced:
  I would recommend leaving the default settings here for relication operations but the "Notifications" tab will allow to configure email notification.

Step 6: Guest Processing

• Enable application-aware image processing:
  This will quiesce with VSS the way a backup job will. I would recommend not using this feature for replication as you're likely doing it with a backup
  
• Enable guest file system indexing:
  This will speed up browsing while restoring individual files. This is not necessary and will increase total replication times.

Step 7: Schedule!