Hey Checkyourlogs Fans,
One of the little-known feature updates with Veeam V12 was the ability to fail back to an older Hyper-V Host finally.
Listed here in the what’s new in Veeam V12 document – https://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_12_0_whats_new_wn.pdf
The Compatibility checker enhancements – You can restore and replicate VMs to Hyper-V hosts of lower versions than the original host if the target host supports the VM Hardware version.
There is little catch on this →: Make sure you don’t upgrade the VM Integrated Services version. If you leave this alone, you can successfully failover and now fail back using the Veeam VBR Console.
This previous was a significant pain in the butt because as we were upgrading the operating systems on Windows Replica Targets, this meant that we could fail over only one way. This would be a backup and restore operation to bring the VMs home.
This new update saves time as our infrastructure is constantly in flux due to the cyber security requirements for keeping modern operating systems.
In a particular case, we had a situation where a large file server failed due to a power outage in one server room. The source host was Server 2019, and the Target was 2022. The failover worked perfectly as expected, but when we went to fail back, this is where it all fell apart. We could not take a significant outage and thus had to leave the source VM file server on the Replica target for longer than expected in Veeam V11.
These new enhancements have saved the day and are allowing us to keep our infrastructure up to date even more rapidly.
We are failing over a Server 2019 VM to a 2022 Replica Target.
We are returning from a Server 2022 VM to a 2019 Replica Target.
This worked like a charm. → Thank you for the hard work with Veeam R&D and Engineering teams for making this new feature a reality. This saves me hundreds of hours per year in time per year for my customers.
Thanks,
Dave
