When creating a new incoming or outgoing replication, you can use a vApp or virtual machine as a seed to avoid transferring large amounts of data over the network during the initial full synchronization.

Prerequisites

  • Verify that the free space in the destination datastore is at least double that of the source vApp or virtual machine. For information about the double space requirement, see Destination Datastore Space Consumption.
  • Verify that the seed vApps or virtual machines exist in the target site.
  • Before starting a replication using a seed, in the target site you must power off the seed virtual machines, because they are unregistered from the target VMware Cloud Director and vCenter Server inventories. If the new replication fails, the virtual machine files and disks remain on the datastore. For the virtual machine to appear in the inventories, locate the .vmx file of the virtual machine, manually import the virtual machine in the vCenter Server inventory, and import it to the VMware Cloud Director inventory.

Procedure

  1. Click either Incoming Replications or Outgoing Replications then click either New protection or New migration.
  2. On the Source VMs page, select the virtual machines or vApps that you want to replicate then click Next.
  3. On the Destination VDC and Storage policy page, select the destination virtual data center to which you want to replicate the workloads and the storage policy then click Next.
  4. On the Settings page, under Advanced disk settings select Configure seed VMs then click Next.
  5. On the Seed VM page, select the vApp or virtual machine and select the seed virtual machines then click Next.
    Note: If you remove a disk from a replication source virtual machine, the seed disk is not deleted from the datastore in the target site.
  6. On the Ready to Complete page, verify that the replication settings are correct then click Finish.

Results

The selected seed is used for the new replication.

What to do next

You can monitor the progress of the replication task by clicking Replication Tasks in the left pane.