Protect a vApp or a virtual machine from one organization to another, and keep the workload running in the source site, by configuring a protection. If the source site is unavailable, after a successful replication you can fail over and power on the source virtual machine in the destination site.
Prerequisites
- Verify that VMware Cloud Director Availability is deployed in both the source and in the destination sites.
- Verify that you can access VMware Cloud Director Availability as a tenant or as a service provider. For more information, see Accessing VMware Cloud Director Availability.
- Verify that your session is extended to the site in which the vApps or virtual machines you are about to protect reside. For more information, see Authenticating to Remote Sites.
Procedure
- In the left pane, choose a replication direction..
- Click .
- Follow the prompts of the New Replication wizard.
- On the Target VDC and Storage policy page, select the destination virtual data center for the replication and the storage policy for placing the recovered virtual machines, and click Next.
For seed vApps and virtual machines, the Replicator Service uses the storage policy of the seed.
For VDCs that do not have replications to them, the Quota column shows Currently unavailable, and is refreshed once every 10 minutes.
- On the Settings page, configure the following replication settings and click Next.
Option Description SLA profile To set the SLA settings of the replication, select any of the preconfigured SLA profiles. To view the SLA profile settings, click Show details. To modify the SLA settings and use custom SLA settings, deselect this option. Target recovery point objective (RPO) If you deselected SLA profile, to set the acceptable period for which data can be lost if there is a site failure use the slider or click the time intervals. The available RPO range is from 5 minutes to 24 hours. Retention policy for point in time instances If you deselected SLA profile, to preserve multiple distinct replication instances to which the virtual machines can be recovered, select this option, select the number of replication instances to keep, and select the preservation period.
The number of preserved replication instances depends on the configured retention policy and requires that the RPO period is short enough for the replication instances to be created. For example, if you select to preserve four replication instances per day, the RPO period must not exceed six hours, to allow for the retention of four replication instances in 24 hours.
Delay start synchronization - To schedule the start of the replication, select this option and enter the local date and time to start the replication.
- To start the replication when the wizard finishes, leave this option deselected.
Exclude disks To exclude some hard disks of the virtual machines from replicating to the destination site, select this option. Configure Seed VMs To use a previous copy of the virtual machines in the destination site, select this option. - If you selected Configure Seed VMs, on the Seed VM page you must select a vApp or a virtual machine to use as seed and click Next.
- If you selected Exclude disks, on the Disks page you must select the hard disks to replicate and click Next.
- On the Ready to Complete page, verify that the configuration settings are correct and click Finish.
- On the Target VDC and Storage policy page, select the destination virtual data center for the replication and the storage policy for placing the recovered virtual machines, and click Next.
