VMware Live Site Recovery takes advantage of vCenter Server services, such as storage management, authentication, authorization, and guest customization. VMware Live Site Recovery also uses the standard set of vSphere administrative tools to manage these services.

Because the VMware Live Site Recovery Server depends on vCenter Server for some services, you must install and configure vCenter Server at a site before you install VMware Live Site Recovery.

You can use VMware Live Site Recovery and vSphere Replication with the vCenter Server Appliance or with a standard vCenter Server installation. You can have vCenter Server Appliance on one site and a standard vCenter Server installation on the other.

How Changes to vCenter Server Inventory Affect VMware Live Site Recovery

Because VMware Live Site Recovery protection groups apply to a subset of the vCenter Server inventory, changes to the protected inventory made by vCenter Server administrators and users can affect the integrity of VMware Live Site Recovery protection and recovery. VMware Live Site Recovery depends on the availability of certain objects, such as virtual machines, folders, resource pools, and networks, in the vCenter Server inventory at the protected and recovery sites. Deletion of resources such as folders or networks that are referenced by recovery plans can invalidate the plan. Renaming or relocating objects in the vCenter Server inventory does not affect VMware Live Site Recovery, unless it causes resources to become inaccessible during test or recovery.

In the case of array-based replication and vSphere Replication, VMware Live Site Recovery can tolerate certain changes at the protected site without disruption.
  • Deleting protected virtual machines.
  • Deleting an object for which an inventory mapping exists.

VMware Live Site Recovery can tolerate certain changes at the recovery site without disruption.

  • Moving placeholder virtual machines to a different folder or resource pool.
  • Deleting an object for which an inventory mapping exists.

VMware Live Site Recovery and the vCenter Server Database

If you update the vCenter Server installation that VMware Live Site Recovery extends, do not reinitialize the vCenter Server database during the update. VMware Live Site Recovery stores identification information about all vCenter Server objects in the VMware Live Site Recovery database. If you reinitialize the vCenter Server database, the identification data that VMware Live Site Recovery has stored no longer matches identification information in the new vCenter Server instance and objects are not found.