Is anyone using Veeam Recovery Orchestrator with vCenter 8.0 and vCenter 7.0 HA Cluster?

We only have 2 sites A local and B its out of state

Is this hard to setup?

Any tips or things to watch for please share you experience

Can the failover process be set up so that if site A goes down Site B will come up automatically with out any manual interaction?

Has anyone set this up that way and test it ?

Share you good bad and ugly scenarios if you dont mine about it.

Any technical or hardware details on this please refer to this post I made

With the current state of VMware support and Veeam not being so bad thus far If can can accomplish the same thing then for the support alone I may go with VRO

Any thoughts?

Thanks in advance

2 Spice ups

My information will be dated. I haven’t used a DR site in almost ten years, but your setup sounds similar. Basing some assumptions off that and what you have stated, here’s what I had and my plans:

Southern base, DR site 200 miles north, and a manufacturing facility on the West Coast. 5 productions hosts of similar size you have, 2 hosts for testing and dev. All replicated to scrap equipment at DR site using Veeam Replication nightly. RPO’s and RTO’s didn’t require more and since this was a global precision manufacturing organization, time slots were limited. Devs set jobs to back up the critical DB servers at regular intervals that were copied same. Critical support servers were split between the two: vcenter, veeam, DC, DNS with no DHCP at DR. Worked well enough and never lost more than a few minutes of critical data in 8 years. I was building out SRM when I left.

The only catch me I had was driving to the DR site (6hrs away) to change parts and subnets. My DR site was an extension of my local subnet. That would not work with SRM at the time.

My current job, we had no real backup or resources on site. We got AD, File Servers for bulk storage and have moved everything else to the cloud somewhere. Veeam goes to Azure and critical/archival to AWS. Critical loaded in Azure: DC, backup target for recovery, DC connector.

Best of luck! Apologies my information is so dated.

2 Spice ups

Thank you for the info so you are using or use VRO for veeam?

I am using Veeam Enterprise 12 with automated testing and manual recovery. I have no critical workloads on site anymore. Apologies for leaving this out. I saw that after I posted, but got distracted with work.

2 Spice ups

Do you prefer this vs vmware replication or SRA?

I used Veeam initially due to ease of use, setup and reporting. This was around 2009. There weren’t many options then. Obligatory walk down memory lane: VMware backup solutions SRA/SRM was where I was going when we decided we wanted to tighten RTO/RPO. Your recovery objectives should dictate. I had 24 hr data loss acceptable and 24 hr recovery objective. Both easily met with Veeam. Veeam recovery can be almost instant if it’s critical machine and you don’t mind some cleanup. Still going to lose some data. I’ll add to earlier, we had hot spares for all critical data sources. Those sql backups loaded to a powered off hot sql server with a vmdk attached to a file server to capture the db backup. We had an exchange cluster with a witness. Anything deemed extremely critical was already running, had a hot backup or a distributed cluster across the three sites. Only thing not hot were the web servers and file servers. I’m starting to feel like I’m rambling now so forgive me.