![veeam availability orchestrator veeam availability orchestrator](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/sis2018veeam-180314065810/95/rethink-veeam-availability-platform-18-638.jpg)
VAO takes all of this fail-over orchestration and applies this to our testing environments as well. Essentially VAO gives us more flexibility in running and trigger external process during a fail-over even than what VBR provides on its’ own. At the moment we are limited to just PowerShell, however we may see more scripting languages supported come GA time. VAO takes all of this and adds flexibility into our recovery plans to execute and trigger pre and post fail-over scripts, along with per-VM testing scripts as well. Meaning we already have replicated our VMs to a DR location, setup our fail-over plans and virtual labs, and completed configuration around re-iping and post fail-over scripts to handle our recovery. VAO takes what you have already setup within VBR and allows you to automate and orchestrate around that. From what I’ve seen we can basically break VAO down into three separate components. That said though, VAO does much much more.
![veeam availability orchestrator veeam availability orchestrator](https://i0.wp.com/domalab.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/domalab.com-Veeam-VAO-install-01.png)
Sure, VAO doesn’t re-invent the wheel when it comes to DR testing – why would they force you to reconfigure all of those Virtual Labs again? They simply import them, along with a lot of information from VBR to use within VAO. I mean, we have the SureReplica technology within VBR and it works great at testing whether or not we can recover so why would we need VAO? The answer here is really about the details. Hearing the phrases like “testing our replicas” and “using the Virtual Labs” you might be wondering what exactly VAO does that VBR doesn’t.
![veeam availability orchestrator veeam availability orchestrator](https://wuchikin.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/16-.png)
VEEAM AVAILABILITY ORCHESTRATOR LICENSE
As far as I know the only limitations associated with Veeam Availability Orchestrator are the fact that it is only supported within a VMware environment and that an Enterprise Plus license must be applied to the VBR instance VAO connects to. As far as the architecture there really isn’t anything special – it’s a web interface, with a SQL backend. Think Veeam ONE, Veeam Business View, and Veeam Backup & Replication all talking together to one centralized Disaster Recovery Orchestration machine.
![veeam availability orchestrator veeam availability orchestrator](https://www.veeam.com/whitepapers/vao-solution-brief_preview_p1.png)
VAO is essentially a wrapper, or an engine that simply interacts with other Veeam products via API calls. Since then I’ve got to see the application move along through various beta stages and was pleasantly surprised to see how the product has matured as they gear up for their 1.0 release (no, I don’t know when that is).įor those not familiar with VAO let me give you a little bit of a breakdown. Michael certainly is a great choice when looking for someone to evangelize this product as he had a number of examples of DR situations he has either helped with, or orchestrated companies through – which had both good and bad outcomes! But back to topic – VAO was announced a while back, in fact, over a year ago Veeam announced their plans for VAO during their “Next big thing” event in April of 2016.
VEEAM AVAILABILITY ORCHESTRATOR UPDATE
As a member of the Veeam Vanguards here at VeeamON 2017 we got to spend a couple of hours with Michael White ( who gave us an update on Veeam Availability Orchestrator – Veeams’ answer to orchestrating and automating fail-over to their replicated VMs.