6.7 Cloud Director failover plans

As described in chapter 6.3, Failover plans are also available for virtual machines replicated towards Cloud Director. The main difference between vSphere and Cloud Director failover plans is the complete delegation of network management to VMware NSX in the case of Cloud Director.

Once the protected virtual machines have at least one restore point stored into Veeam Cloud Connect, a tenant can use the failover capabilities he subscribed to.

In order to complete a failover, a tenant can choose to failover one single virtual machine, or to orchestrate the entire process by configuring a Failover Plan. A Failover Plan is a group of virtual machines that Veeam Backup & Replication has to manage as a single entity, following the boot order and delays configured in the plan itself. When it comes to Veeam Cloud Connect, a Cloud Failover Plan has additional options.

6.53: Create a Cloud VMware Failover Plan

After giving the new Failover Plan a unique name (unique for the tenant, as multiple tenants at the service provider can have the same name for their failover plans without any problem), the tenant selects the virtual machine he wants to add to this plan.

Only virtual machines replicated to Cloud Director are shown in the selection screen, and only those with at least one complete restore point available can be selected. Replica VM’s are added to the Cloud Failover Plan, where boot order and delay can be configured:

6.54: Select replica VM’s

When a full failover is initiated, virtual machines are started in the configured order. Other options to execute the failover plans for vCloud Director is to use the Cloud Connect Portal, or ask the service provider to start it from his own console where it is effectively stored:

6.55: Start failover plan at the provider side

As a last option, virtual machines can also be started directly from the Cloud Director web interface.