Hello all, I am very happy to say that what I have been working for a long time - with many other people - has now reached General Availability. It is a big release and we are going to look at things in this article.
Release Notes - https://www.veeam.com/veeam_orchestrator_2_0_release_notes_en_rn.pdf
Bits - https://www.veeam.com/availability-orchestrator-download.html
It is important to note there is no upgrade to 2.0. You will need to install it separate and recreate your plans. There will be an KB article to help. But most important is remember to uninstall your VAO agents from your VBR servers so that new agents can be installed. The plan definition reports will provide the info for each plan you need to recreate.
Us two product managers did not make the decision for no upgrade lately. It was important though as it will allow some architecture decisions to be made that will be good for customers in the future. Once such decision is to remove the need for Production VAO servers. They are not required or useful any longer.
What are some of the new features - the key ones?
Scopes
Scopes will let you have resources and reporting - plus people that are separate and unseen by other users. Sort of like multi-tenancy but more to allow offices or groups to have separate plans.
Above you can see both a default and HR scope. Here you can say who belongs to what.
Above you can see the reporting options that can be defined by each scope.
Above is VM groups and you can use the button indicated above to assign them to different scopes. This is true for other resources such as DataLabs.
Backups
In v1 you could use replicas to create your plans, but in v2 you can use replicas OR backups to create your plans. It is almost identical no matter which you choose but there are some small differences.
In our Orchestration Plans they will look identical except for as we can see above. Failover for replica’s and Restore for backups.
As well when you look at the individual steps you will notice one that is Restore VM rather than process replica - as you can see above.
BTW, recoveries using backups can go to the original or new locations. Re-IP is possible as well.
If you design your VBR servers well, the recovery of a backup is surprising fast!
VM Console
This feature will allow you, from within VAO to access a VM’s console. It uses the VMware VMRC HTML5 functionality to do it.
The plan needs to stay on for a some time, and if so you will see an option like below.
You highlight a VM, and select that button and you end up in the VMware HTML5 VMRC and will need to log in. Very handy for things like checking to see if a complex app has started and is usable.
General
There is a lot of little things like polish in the UI. Sort of discrete but also nice. One that is not so discrete is that we have added RTO and RPO to the plans and reports. This means a readiness check will have a warning if the RTO / RPO defined is not possible.
Another thing is that production VAO servers are no longer required or useful. There is only DR VAO servers.
Summary
A big release, and with an interesting range of new stuff. You can watch my blog using this tag - https://notesfrommwhite.net/tag/vao_tech for new articles.
Michael
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Is VAO Active-Active DR Solution ?
Thank You
Sudhir
Hello there,
You can install VAO in an active passive config, or an active active config, which is in fact my favorite way to do it.
Michael