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Replication Process

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    All replication infrastructure components engaged in replication make up a data pipe. VM data is moved over this data pipe block by block, with multiple processing cycles.

    The replication process is performed in the following way:

    1. Veeam Backup & Replication triggers Hyper-V to create a snapshot for a VM.
    2. After the snapshot is created, the source-side Veeam Data Mover Service copies VM data from the volume shadow copy. During incremental job runs, the Veeam Data Mover Service retrieves only those data blocks that have changed since the previous job run (with changed block tracking enabled, the speed of incremental replication dramatically increases).
      While copying, the source-side Data Mover Service performs additional processing — it consolidates content of virtual disks by filtering out zero data blocks and blocks of swap files.
    3. Copied blocks of data are compressed and moved from the source-side Veeam Data Mover Service to the target-side Data Mover Service.
    4. The target-side Veeam Data Mover Service decompresses replica data and writes the result to the destination volume.