Creating a Veeam Replication Failover Plan

Owned by Tahir Kulelija
Last updated: 03 Dec 2020
3 min read

Once all the selected virtual machines have at least one restore point replicated up to Zettagrid, you can use the failover resources to action a full failover. Before a Full Failover can initiated a failover plan must be configured. A failover plan is configured to failover one or a many virtual machines. These are managed as a single entity, following the boot order and delays configured in the plan itself.

You can configure one or several failover plans for VMs that have replicas. In case a group of production VMs goes offline, you can run the cloud failover plan in one of the following ways:

  • Start a cloud failover plan using Veeam Cloud Connect Portal.
  • Contact the Zettagrid Operations Center so that we can starts a cloud failover plan using the Veeam Backup & Replication console at our end^
  • Start a cloud failover plan using you onsite Veeam Backup & Replication console in case your Veeam backup server is not affected by the disaster

When the the failover operation starts, you can choose to fail over to the latest state of a VM replica or to any of its good known restore points.

To configure a Failover Plan, Click on the Failover Plan Ribbon Item in the Backup and Replication Menu and choose

After giving the new failover plan a unique name select the virtual machine or machines you want to add to this plan

If multiple virtual machines are selected, the boot order can be adjusted by clicking on the Set Delay button.

Next you configure the Default Gateway settings for the VM network mapped during the creation of the initial Replication Job.

Cloud Network Default Gateway: When a full failover is initiated, the network extension appliance enables the different internal networks and sets the configured default gateway?s IP address as its own address. The result is that any virtual machine connected to a cloud network can reach its original gateway without changing its original IP address. The NEA is simulating the original gateway of the tenant?s production network

In the example below the default gateway is set to 172.17.0.1 with a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 to simulate the VM network being failed over.

If you have multiple Virtual Machines It?s suggested that you select Route Taffic between these networks if you have VMs replicating and mapped into different cloud network subnets.

The next step is the configuration of Public IP Addresses and mapping of networking services. The network extension appliance has one external interface, published over the internet. If more than one Public IP has been purchased additional addresses will also be attached to this interface. Click on ?Assign public IP addresses to use during full site failover? then to create firewall and network address translation rules click the ?Add? button.

From here click on the Add VM button to choose the VM for which the rule is to be created. In the Public IP Address drop down you have the option of choosing any of the Public IP Addresses assigned to your Hardware Plan. If multiple IPs have been purchased, they will all appear. You then can enter in the Port the service you are publishing runs on. For the Internal IP address of the replica VM drop down, if you are mapping a Windows VM with VMware Tools the IP address will appear, if you are mapping a Linux VM you can manually enter in the IP address and then the service port. Note that you can configure PAT if required by configuring a source Port.

Note that once a Public IP has been used in a Failover Plan it can not be used by any other Failover Plan

Click Ok and Next to view the Summary of the Failover Plan, click Finish to complete.