Monday, 7 September 2015

How to properly Failover and Failback VM replicas in VEEAM

For example in the case of Crypto virus and variants, having a good replica can save your butt.

Steps:

  1. From vCentre, shut down the messed up VM in your production environment
  2. In Veeam, go to Replicas - Ready, and hopefully you will find the machine in question and the restore point will be recent (but before s*** hit the fan)
  3. Right click and "Failover Now", choose the correct restore point. Your machine will now power on in your DR environment and you'll find it under Replicas - Active.
  4. At this point the VM can be used by users while you restore the other one from backup, or...
  5. At a more appropriate time, you can "Failback" to return your Replica to the Production Cluster/Host (this will incur a downtime, length depends on the number of changes made to the VM while running in this mode).
  6. Failback will either "merge" the VM to the oriignal or you can choose to Merge it to a different VM if you restored it somewhere else.
  7. Users can still work until the VM powers off, it will remain powered off until disks are merged.
  8. Once this is done it will power on automatically in the Production environment, at which point you can...
  9. "Commit Failback" to return to normal.