Requirements and Limitations

If you plan to use CDP to protect your workloads, consider the following requirements and limitations.

Licensing

CDP is included in the Veeam Universal License. When using a legacy socket-based license, the Enterprise Plus edition is required.

Platforms and Datastores

CDP is supported for a limited number of platforms. For more information, see Platform Support.
CDP supports specific source and target datastores. For more information, see Veeam CDP Source and Target.

Infrastructure Components

The backup server must have at least 16 GB RAM.
VMware CDP proxy must meet the requirements listed in section VMware CDP Proxy.
The network between the infrastructure components must suit the load on your infrastructure. We recommend that you use at least 100 Mbps network. Slower networks cannot handle the generated disk traffic without interruption. The better performance is proven on 10 Gbps networks or faster and MTU 9000.
You must configure CDP for one cluster on one backup server only. If you add a cluster to another backup server and install the I/O filter (filter required for CDP) on it, CDP policies on the first backup server will fail. For more information on the I/O filter, see I/O Filter.

The maximum number of CDP policies that can be created on one backup server is 100.
If you add a new cluster to the vCenter server after the I/O filter is installed on the existing clusters, you need to install the I/O filter manually on the newly added cluster. To do that, open the I/O Filter Management wizard, make sure that check boxes are selected near all clusters where the I/O filter must be present and finish the wizard.

CDP works only for powered on VMs. However, for VMs with IDE hard drives you must power off VMs before the initial synchronization. This is required to apply a new storage policy to VMs. For more information, see How CDP Works.
CDP is not supported for VMs to which VM storage policies with multiple datastore specific rule sets apply. If you need to define datastores to be used for placement of the VMs, you can add a tag rule for vSAN instead of a tag based placement datastore specific rule. For more information on how to create tag rules for vSAN, see VMware Docs.
Shared disks, physical RDM and SCSI bus sharing are not supported. Note that vRDM disks are supported.
One VM can be processed only by one CDP policy.

During the initial synchronization, Veeam Backup & Replication needs double space allocation for VMs with thick-provisioned disks on the target host. After the initial synchronization finishes, Veeam Backup & Replication frees half of the allocated space for such VMs. This is a part of mechanism required to support protection of disks newly added to the source VMs.

Make sure that the Allow I/O filters before encryption parameter is set to True for the VM storage policy component. For more details, see VMware vSphere documentation.
To create encrypted CDP policy, select the encrypted datastore at the Destination step of the wizard. For more information, see Creating CDP Policies.
Encryption for transaction log files that contain incremental changes for disks is not supported. For more information, see CDP Replication Chain.

Replicas

On the target host, Veeam Backup & Replication does not allow you to migrate replicas using VMware vSphere Storage vMotion. Note that host vMotion is allowed.
Replicas can be powered on only using the failover operation; powering on replicas manually is not supported.
For Veeam Backup & Replication versions prior to 12.1 (build 12.1.0.2131), testing CDP replicas in Virtual Labs is not supported. Starting from version 12.1 (build 12.1.0.2131), Veeam Backup & Replication supports testing. For more information, see SureReplica.