Hello there,
If you are using Veeam Availability Orchestrator (VAO) you may have noticed that we limit a VM group to start 10 VMs simultaneously. If your plan has two VM groups that means the first group starts 10 VMs at a time until there are not more to start, than the next VM group starts recovering 10 VMs at a time.
What happens if you want to recover faster? First is it possible? If you have all flash storage, or very fast storage, and your vCenter has spare RAM / Processor then it is possible.
Here is the process.
- Do a test failover of the plan you wish to have proceed more quickly. If the DataLab is already running the test failover time is fairly close to the actual failover time. Remember or record the time.
- Confirm your vCenter is healthy. This is a good place to start.
- Next you should increase the number of simultaneous starts. It can be found when you edit your VM group.
- Depending on your storage you will make the choice. If you have all flash for example, then I would suggest trying 20 instead of 10.
- Now with the lab group already running, do your test failover again. Record the time.
- More VMs starting might impact vCenter so make sure it is still good. Us the Past Day setting and see if there is a big spike where you did the test.
- But, if the vCenter is still good, determine how much time you saved.
- If the time is not good enough, and you think you still have resources in vCenter, you can try increasing the number again.
- Remember this impacts your storage, and your vCenter strongly. So at some point you potentially may need to back the number down. I think 10 is very safe for everyone, but if you have a good vCenter and nice storage you should be able to get it quite a bit higher. Maybe 30?
Another way to decrease the time of failovers is how you design your plans. Multi - tier apps can make plans very slow if you use sequencing, but can be much faster if you use a different design. I talk about that design in this article.
I hope that this article helps, but I am very open to questions and comments. And don’t forget all my VAO technical articles can be found via this tag.
BTW, I don’t have a decent work lab, and I have a small lab at home I use. So I could not show better screenshots. Sorry about that.
Michael
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