Before You Begin

Before you create a replication job, check the following prerequisites:

• Backup infrastructure components that will take part in the replication process must be added to the backup infrastructure and properly configured. These include source and target ESX(i) hosts, one backup proxy for onsite replication scenario or two backup proxies for offsite replication scenario and backup repository for storing replica metadata.
• The target datastore must have enough free space to store disks of replicated VMs. To receive alerts about low space on the target datastore, configure global notification settings. For more information, see Specifying Other Notification Settings.
• If you plan to replicate VMs via WAN accelerators, source and target WAN accelerators must be added to the backup infrastructure and properly configured. For more information, see Adding WAN Accelerators.

• If you plan to replicate VMs via WAN accelerators, it is recommended that you pre-populate global cache on the target WAN accelerator before you start the replication job. Global cache population helps reduce the amount of traffic transferred over WAN. For more information, see Populating Global Cache.

• If you plan to replicate VMs from the backup, the backup job that you plan to use as the source must be configured beforehand. For more information, see Remote Replica from Backup.

• If you plan to use pre-job and post-job scripts and/or pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts, you must create scripts before you configure the replication job. Veeam Backup & Replication supports script files in the following formats: EXE, BAT, CMD, JS, VBS, WSF, PS1, SH.

Mind the following limitations:

• If you change the size of VM disks on the source VM, Veeam Backup & Replication will delete all available restore points on the VM replica during the next replication job session.
• Due to Microsoft limitations, you cannot use Microsoft Azure Active Directory credentials to perform application-aware processing on VMs running Microsoft Windows 10.

• If you assign the role of a backup proxy to a VM, you should not add this VM to the list of processed VMs in a job that uses this backup proxy. Such configuration may result in degraded job performance. Veeam Backup & Replication will assign this backup proxy to process other VMs in the job first, and processing of this VM itself will be put on hold. Veeam Backup & Replication will report the following message in the job statistics: VM is a backup proxy, waiting for it to stop processing tasks. The job will start processing this VM only after the backup proxy deployed on the VM finishes its tasks.

• Veeam Backup & Replication ignores the cardinality setting for VM tag categories. For example, you create a tag category Priority and set cardinality to One tag per object. In the tag category, you create two tags: Normal and High. You assign the Normal tag to a VM folder and the High tag to a VM in this folder. If you now configure a job that will process objects with the Normal tag, the VM with the High tag will also be added to this job (since Veeam Backup & Replication regards that VMs and templates in the VM container inherit the tag assigned to the container).

To overcome this situation, you can add to the list of exclusions the tag assigned to objects that you do not want to process.