Permanent Failover

To finalize the failover process, a tenant can permanently fail over to the VM replica on the cloud host. A tenant can perform the permanent failover operation if he or she wants to permanently switch from the original VM to a VM replica on the cloud host and use this replica as the original VM. As a result of permanent failover, the VM replica takes on the role of the original VM.

In the cloud replication scenario, you can perform permanent failover after full site failover. The permanent failover operation can be started from the Veeam Backup & Replication console by a tenant on the tenant side or by the SP on the SP side. To perform permanent failover for all VMs in the cloud failover plan, a tenant or the SP needs to process every VM in the cloud failover plan individually.

Permanent failover in Veeam Cloud Connect Replication slightly differs from regular permanent failover. The operation is performed in the following way:

1. Veeam Backup & Replication removes snapshots (restore points) of the VM replica from the snapshot chain and deletes associated files from the storage (datastore or volume depending on the virtualization platform). Changes that were written to the snapshot delta file or differencing disk are committed to the VM replica disk files to bring the VM replica to the most recent state.
2. To protect the VM replica from corruption after permanent failover is complete, Veeam Backup & Replication reconfigures the replication job and adds the original VM to the list of exclusions. When the replication job starts, the original VM is skipped from processing. As a result, no data is written to the working VM replica.

Unlike regular VM replica, the VM replica on the cloud host is not removed from the list of replicas in the Veeam Backup & Replication console. Instead, it is put to Permanent failover state.