V-Motion for VMWare for Disaster Recovery

Features such as live migration and storage migration allow applications to keep running even in the event of hardware failure. This can prove critical for companies that cannot afford downtime in their communications platforms. Moreover, virtualization eliminates the need to purchase expensive redundant servers and additional licenses by creating an environment where multiple servers act as one allowing for applications to remain online automatically and seamlessly during hardware outages.

VMware vSphere live migration allows you to move an entire running virtual machine from one physical server to another, with no downtime. But for a PBX system with phone calls activity , that may affect active calls.But the process of movement does not take much time.

The virtual machine retains its network identity and connections, ensuring a seamless migration process. Transfer the virtual machine’s active memory and precise execution state over a high-speed network, allowing the virtual machine to switch from running on the source vSphere host to the destination vSphere host, which can be in the same VMware environment or another cluster or another datacenter.

Since a server can be moved to completely different hardware while it is running, without downtime the underlying hardware can be swapped out, or taken down for maintenance without the end-users or other applications being affected, or even knowing it has happened. For more information about how vMotion works, you can check on these links

• https://www.thegeekpub.com/8407/how-vMotion-works/#:~:text=VMotion%20is%20VMWare's%20technology%20that,sometimes%20called%20%E2%80%9Clive%20migration%E2%80%9D.

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So, using the vMotion feature, we can migrate Switchvox from one host to another host, a cluster to another cluster or from a data center to another data center.

Migrating to another datacenter or another node, is basically like any other VM. If there is the same virtual network infrastructure there, nothing needs to be done as far as Switchvox is concerned. If not, then it needs to be treated as any other VM and have the IP updated and any other network pieces that the customer has in place.

How to proceed with the migration

In our example, we are considering having our Switchvox on IP address 10.10.26.2, running on the node with IP 10.10.9.51 and we are going to move it to another host with IP set to 10.10.9.58

Step 1: Right click on your VMware (SWVX1 in my example)

Step 3: Select a migration type. 

You can either move to Compute resource or storage or both. It depends on how you are using the VMware. 
If your storage is in a shared storage, so you can only move compute resources.

In our example we use Change both

Step 4: Select a Compute resource

Click next once selected and you will see compatibility checks succeed if your choice is compatible with it.

Step 5: Select Storage

You should see compatibility checks succeed.

Step 6: Select Networks

Click next and select the network. Check the Compatibility text area to confirm all checks succeeded.

Step 7: Select vMotion Priority

Step 8: Ready to complete

You will be presented with a summary to confirm all the choices made.

Step 9: Finish 

Thus will start the effective migration

When the migration process completes, Switchvox migrated machine will show the same old IP address it was running on the new host 10.10.9.58.

Some useful Veeam document 

• https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/replication.html?ver=100

• https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/surebackup_job.html?ver=100

• https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/recovery_verification_surereplica.html?ver=100

• https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/data_recovery.html?ver=100

How to install Veeam backup and replica, please check these videos and documents to know how you can install Veeam backup and replica and add your servers, Hyper-V or VMware and how to add a backup and replica job

Installing Veeam Backup & Replication - User Guide for VMware vSphere

Creating Backup Jobs - User Guide for VMware vSphere

Creating Replication Jobs - Veeam Cloud Connect Guide

Some useful Vmotion documents:

https://www.vmware.com/ca/products/vsphere/vmotion.html

https://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmotion_datasheet.pdf