VDrO - DR from Replicas — Gabriele Pelizzari

The first step by step guide how to set up a Disaster Recovery plan starting from a replica job.

Anyway, I suggest having a look at the previous articles before reading this one.

VDrO-Baseline 1 – VDrO-Baseline 2

In today’s example, I imagined implementing a DR-Orchestration for a company selling tickets. The two VMs that deliver the services are the Domain controller and SQL DB with installed the application needed.

The main points are:

Setting up replica job using VBR present into VDrO
Creating Tags
Adding the plan components to the scope
Creating a lab group
Configuring the Orchestration Plan
Testing

1. Setting up Replica Job

From the Veeam console, it’s quite easy to set up the Replica Job (From Picture 1 to 5).

Picture 1

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2.Creating Tags

Veeam-One Business View is reachable from the Veeam Monitor console. To create the tagging just select add Category (Picture 7) from the resource you want to tag (in the picture are Virtual machines).

Picture 7

After folding it up with a name (Picture 8) in pictures 9, 10, 11, and 12 is shown how easy it is customizing the tag.

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Picture 11 shows how to concatenate the conditions.

That means that it is possible to add different conditions selecting for every entry the logical operator “and – or”.

3. Adding the plan components to the scope

From the Administrator panel, through plan components, it is possible to select which VM groups can be added to the scope.

In our example, we are going to create a DR-strategy for SQL-Production scope (picture 14) using the VM Groups named SQL – Produzione (Picture 15). How to do it? Just clicking on the include button.

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Now it’s time to repeat the same procedure for Recovery location (Picture 16), Plan steps (Picture 17), Credential (Picture 18), and Template jobs (Picture 19).

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Now that we have finally added all components to the baskets. we need to create an Orchestration Plan for this specific service.

4. Creating a Lab group

From the main menu select Datalabs entry.

Now clicking on the add button, it’s possible to assign the tasks that will be performed during tests to the Datalab as shown in Picture 20,21,22.

Remember that the Datalab assignment has been already performed from the VDrO administrator page.

Picture 20

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5. Configuring the Orchestration Plan

The configuration wizard has been already explained in my previous article (VDrO – Baseline2).

Please find hereafter a short summary.

If you set it up correctly you should see your VMs in the VMGroups (picture 27&28) as they belong to the scope set on step 2 (Picture 24).

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6. Testing

There are two different tests performed by VDrO.

Readiness Check (Picture 30-31) is a low-impact method to confirm that the configuration of an orchestration plan matches the DR environment.

Datalab Test simulates the DR starting VMs, Applications, and Services into a different network. The data labs have to be set up from the VBR console (Picture 32-34).