6.2 vSphere replication jobs

Now that the service provider has set up the Cloud Host for the tenant, it’s time for the latter to start consuming his replication resources. In Veeam terms, a Cloud Host is the abstracted view of the multi-tenant environment offered by the service provider, and seen by the tenant as a remote Virtualized Host that can be used as a replication target.

In order to guarantee the most transparent user experience, Veeam Cloud Connect allows to replicate VM’s towards the service provider by using the well known replication jobs. Exactly like in a backup or backup copy job used to consume Veeam Cloud Connect Backup, also in this case jobs are configured in the same exact manner, and just the target is different.

Once the customer has been assigned Replication resources in his subscription, first thing he can do is to rescan the services offered by the service provider:

Rescan service provider

6.9: Rescan service provider

First, the tenant can notice that replication resources are now available by the fact that Manage default gateways… is enabled:

Manage default gateways is now enabled

6.10: Manage default gateways is now enabled

By going into the Backup Infrastructure node, the tenant can see the Cloud Host listed under the available VMware resources, side by side with his local vSphere environment:

An overview of the Cloud Host

6.11: An overview of the Cloud Host

In the properties of the Cloud Host, the tenant can verify that the amount of resources are those requested upon subscribing the the Hardware Plan (4 Ghz of cpu, 16 GB of memory, 100 GB storage and 1 network with internet access in our example), and he can verify that the service provider is using VMware vSphere 7.0.

Everything is ready for the first replication job towards Cloud Connect.

The new replication job is configured first by setting a name for the job itself:

Create a new replication job

6.12: Create a new replication job

It’s important to select Network remapping (for DR sites with different virtual networks). This option enables the Network settings of the replication job, that will be important to correctly map tenant networks to the networks created inside Cloud Connect. Re-IP, on the other side, is not needed (and not available) in Cloud Connect.

Next step, a tenant selects the virtual machines that he wants to replicate towards Veeam Cloud Connect:

Select one or more VMs to replicate

6.13: Select one or more VMs to replicate

Next, we select the destination:

Specify destination of the replication job

6.14: Specify destination of the replication job

This is the only difference between a local replication and the one towards Veeam Cloud Connect. The tenant selects the Cloud Host as a target and then chooses the Cloud Host published by the service provider:

Select Clod Host

6.15: Select Clod Host

Once the Hardware Plan is selected, the tenant can verify which VMware datastores are offered, and select one of them (there is only one in this example):

Select datastore

6.16: Select datastore

Then, it’s time for the network mapping:

Network mapping

6.17: Network mapping

Here, a tenant is going to see the source network of his own virtual environment, and be able to map each network to a network created at the service provider. In this simple case, the tenant has only one network with internet access, so every VM is going to be mapped to the single network made available in the Hardware Plan by the Service Provider. In more complex environments, there will be multiple source and target networks to be coupled.

The rest of the job configuration follows the same steps of any replication job.

Before the first replication job is started, the tenant also needs to configure the Default Gateways. This can be done by clicking into the dedicated option in the service provider menu:

Edit default gateways

6.18: Edit default gateways

Here, the tenant configure the gateway as it is setup in his own virtual network. In this way, once the NEA at the service provider is powered on, it can replicate the same configuration and act as the default gateway of the failed over VM’s.

Once the job is saved and scheduled, VM’s are replicated to Veeam Cloud Connect, and the service provider can see them in the target vSphere environment, under the resource pool created for the specified tenant:

Virtual machines in tenant's resource pool

6.19: Virtual machines in tenant’s resource pool

Virtual machines are named with also the tenant’s name as a prefix, so no confusion or name conflict can be generated inside the shared vSphere environment.

In the tenant environment, replicated virtual machines show up in Ready state in Veeam Backup & Replication, ready to be used for failover activities:

Virtual machine replicas in ready state

6.20: Virtual machine replicas in ready state