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scherian
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2 hosts, 1 v-center + Veeam B&R

Hi community,

I currently purchased a 2nd Dell server and have installed Esxi 6.7 on it and soon am planning to install v-center appliance 6.7 as well.

We currently have essentials kit license and one existing Dell server esxi host (6.5) running a few VMs.

I would like some input on the community experience on the best way to set things up so that if one VM fails on my existing host, I will be able to quickly migrate to the 2nd host.

I understand I do not have v-motion with the v-sphere essentials kit, so looking to leverage my existing Veeam B&R platform to help with redundancy and possibly restore VMs to a new location? if that is possible. 

Existing dell server host networking is setup like this

- Management Network - vswitch0 - vmnic0 (physical) - 1 gig port (VLAN- 100)

- Production Network - vswitch1 -   vmnic1 & vnmic2 (physical) - 1 Gig ports (VLAN-1)

-- 2 x SSDs + 6 x HDDs (two datastores)

New dell server host networking not yet setup but it has these physical ports that i could use in any fashion.

vmnic0 - 10 gig (teaming)---> thinking of assigning to Prod Network and put on VLAN 1

vmnic1 - 10 gig (teaming)

vnmnic2 - 1 gig (thinking of using this for Mgmt and put on the same MGMT VLAN 100 as my 1st host)

-- 2 x SSDs + 6 x HDDs (two datastores)

Question

1. Am i able to achieve some sort of decent redundancy with the above hosts + licenses/budget?

2. Does it make sense to install v-center appliance on the new Dell server, add both hosts? and manage them from the v-center console?

3. Should i update my 1st host to 6.7 first? before adding to the v-center?

4.. will the difference in NIC speeds on both hosts impact anything? in terms of relocating VMs from one host to the other?

5. any other words of wisdom would be appreciated

thx

1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
ofnl
Contributor
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Hi there, I don't know anything about vCentre but we do use Veeam. I have recently used Veeam to migrate VMs from one host to another with minimal downtime using Veeam's replication tools.

Essentially you can replicate a server from one host to another, shut it down on the original host and boot it up on the new host. Our hosts and VMs are all on the same subnet, if yours are not then you will need to change network settings on the VM.

Thinking about a quick recovery after a VM fail, we plan on using replication to keep copies of VMs on a 3rd VM host, but powered down, then every night doing an incremental replication to pick up any changes. Then if a VM falls over, we can quickly boot up the replicated VM. We may have to recover some data but at least we will have a working VM up and running with data as up to the latest replication.

Hope that helps.

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2 Replies
ofnl
Contributor
Contributor
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Hi there, I don't know anything about vCentre but we do use Veeam. I have recently used Veeam to migrate VMs from one host to another with minimal downtime using Veeam's replication tools.

Essentially you can replicate a server from one host to another, shut it down on the original host and boot it up on the new host. Our hosts and VMs are all on the same subnet, if yours are not then you will need to change network settings on the VM.

Thinking about a quick recovery after a VM fail, we plan on using replication to keep copies of VMs on a 3rd VM host, but powered down, then every night doing an incremental replication to pick up any changes. Then if a VM falls over, we can quickly boot up the replicated VM. We may have to recover some data but at least we will have a working VM up and running with data as up to the latest replication.

Hope that helps.

Lalegre
Virtuoso
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Hey scherian​,

A lot of steps to mention here:

  • Having only one vmnic for management is a Single Point of Failure (SPOF) and as you do not have any mechanism such as HA or vMotion I will recommend you to at least add a secondary vmnic as Standby for having redundancy. Always have at least two vmnics in every portgroup.
  • For Veeam Replication I suggest you to install one Veeam Proxy on both hosts to use the Hot-Add capabilities as if not you will have to use Network protocol and that traffic goes over the vmk0 which is the Management network, where in your case you have only one uplink and that uplink has 1Gb which you can easily saturate depending of the traffic you are sending for the replicas. And of course, as I mentioned before, you do not have any redundancy.
  • Having vCenter in this situation is good to administering everything from a single point however it is just for that and will not provide any additional feature, but of course you can use it for Alarms, monitoring performance, and RBAC in case needed.
  • In case one of the ESXi fails I would recommend you to create a Failover Plan in Veeam and configure a correct application order powering on based on dependencies such as essential services first (Domain Controllers, NTP, DNS, etc) and then application order (Database first then, App Server, Web Server, etc)

Regarding the redundancy of course you will have it and it is better of having nothing, also if you have enough space made a backup of the Replica to have at least two copies of the same Virtual Machine.