Replication

To ensure efficient and reliable data protection in your virtual environment, Veeam Backup & Replication complements image-based backup with image-based replication. Replication is the process of copying a VM from its primary location (source host) to a destination location (redundant target host). Veeam Backup & Replication creates an exact copy of the VM (replica), registers it on the target host and maintains it in sync with the original VM.

Replication provides the best recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) values, as you actually have a copy of your VM in a ready-to-start state. That is why replication is commonly recommended for the most critical VMs (which run tier 1 applications) that need minimum RTOs. Veeam Backup & Replication provides means to perform both onsite replication for high availability (HA) scenarios and remote (offsite) replication for disaster recovery (DR) scenarios. To facilitate replication over WAN or slow connections, Veeam Backup & Replication optimizes traffic transmission — it filters out unnecessary data blocks (such as, duplicate data blocks, zero data blocks or blocks of swap files) and compresses replica traffic. Veeam Backup & Replication also allows you to apply network throttling rules to prevent replication jobs from consuming the entire bandwidth available in your environment.

Replication is a job-driven process with one replication job used to process one or more VMs. You can start the job manually every time you need to copy VM data or, if you want to run replication unattended, create a schedule to start the job automatically. Scheduling options for replication jobs are similar to those for backup jobs.

In This Section

• VM Replica Types
• Replication Components
• Replication Process
• Replication Scenarios
• Replication Data Paths
• Advanced Replication Technologies
• Network Mapping and Re-IP
• Replica Failover and Failback