Setting up replication with Veeam 6.5 over a slow WAN link with the option “Map replicas to existing VMs”

I’ve recently had to set up a disaster recovery environment for a client using Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 (6.5.0.109):

… as the replicating application to replicate virtual machines from their office to another datacenter.  The virtual machines were quite large and the link between the office and the datacenter was only 10Mbps so we decide to use the Low connection bandwidth (enable replica seeding) option:

… where we would copy the Veeam backups to the DR site and use the Get seed from the following backup repository:

to perform the initial seeding so we won’t have to pull the terabytes of data through a 10Mbps link.  What I noticed immediately when I kicked off this job was that the operation’s data rate was going as slow as the 10Mbps link so I placed a call into Veeam support and was told that this feature apparently had a bug and that I should workaround this problem by:

1. Install Veeam onto a server in the DR site
2. Copy the backups to DR
3. Use the Veeam server in the DR site to perform an actual restore onto the vCenter/ESXi hosts serving as the replication target
4. Use the Map replicas to existing VMs option to map the replica (the manually restored VM)

I have since gone ahead to do this and was able to get the replication between sites going.