Using Site Recovery Manager with vSphere Replication on Sites with Storage DRS or Storage vMotion

Follow the guidelines if you use vSphere Replication to protect or recover virtual machines on sites that use Storage DRS or Storage vMotion.

• vSphere Replication is compatible with vSphere Storage DRS on both protected and recovery sites. On the protected site, you can use Storage DRS to move the disk files of virtual machines that vSphere Replication protects, with no impact on the ongoing replication. On the recovery site, you must register the vSphere Replication appliance with the vCenter Single Sign-On service so that Storage DRS can identify the replica disk files on the Storage DRS cluster and generate migration recommendations. You can use Storage DRS to migrate replica disk files with no impact on subsequent recovery. See Register the vSphere Replication Appliance with vCenter Single Sign-On from the vSphere Replication documentation for details.
• vSphere Replication is compatible with Storage vMotion on the protected site. You can use Storage vMotion to move the disk files of replicated virtual machines on the protected site with no impact on the ongoing replication.
• Site Recovery Manager detects the changes and fails over the virtual machine successfully.
• Site Recovery Manager supports Storage DRS clusters on the recovery site with datastores containing the vSphere Replication replica disks.
• vSphere Replication is compatible with Storage vMotion and saves the state of a disk or virtual machine when the home directory of a disk or virtual machine moves. Replication of the disk or virtual machine continues normally after the move.
• A full sync causes Storage DRS to generate migration recommendations or directly trigger Storage vMotion if Storage DRS running in fully-automated mode. This happens if the DRS rules are very aggressive, or if a large number of virtual machines perform a full sync at the same time. The default I/O latency threshold for Storage DRS is 15ms. By default, Storage DRS performs loading balancing operations every 8 hours. Storage DRS also waits until it has collected sufficient statistics about the I/O load before it generates Storage vMotion recommendations. Consequently, a full sync only affects Storage DRS recommendations if the full sync lasts for a long time and if, during that time, the additional I/O that the full sync generates causes the latency to exceed the I/O latency threshold.
• When you use Storage DRS in manual mode on protected virtual machine datastores, stale recommendations might exist after a failover. After reprotecting the failed over virtual machines to the original site, if you apply these stale Storage DRS recommendations, the Site Recovery Manager placeholder VM becomes corrupted, causing a subsequent recovery to the original site to fail for the VMs for which the Storage DRS recommendations were applied. If you apply stale updates, unregister the placeholder VM and use the Site Recovery Manager repair operation to recreate a valid placeholder. To avoid this issue, clear any stale recommendations from a prior failover from that site by regenerating Storage DRS recommendations for the affected Storage DRS storage cluster after reprotect successfully completes.