VMware Live Site Recovery uses vSphere Replication to protect individual virtual machines and their virtual disks by replicating them from one vCenter Server instance to another. With this procedure you can add the virtual machines to protection groups and recovery plans.
When you configure replication, you set a recovery point objective (RPO) to determine the maximum data loss that you can tolerate. For example, an RPO of 1 hour seeks to ensure that a virtual machine loses the data for no more than 1 hour during the recovery. For smaller RPO values, less data is lost in a recovery, but more network bandwidth is consumed keeping the replica up to date. The RPO value affects replication scheduling, but vSphere Replication does not adhere to a strict replication schedule.
Every time that a virtual machine reaches its RPO target, vSphere Replication records approximately 3800 bytes of data in the vCenter Server events database. If you set a low RPO period, this can quickly create a large volume of data in the database. To reduce the volume of data that is kept in the vCenter Server events database, limit the number of days that vCenter Server retains event data. See Configure Database Retention Policy in the vCenter Server and Host Management Guide. Alternatively, set a higher RPO value.
Prerequisites
- Verify that the vSphere Replication appliance is deployed at the source and the target sites.
- Verify that the vSphere Replication appliances are paired.
- Enhanced replications require both sites of the pairing to be with a minimum version of vSphere Replication 9.0.
- vSphere Replication 9.0 requires network encryption for Enhanced replications.
- Enhanced mode replications require minimum versions vSphere Replication 9.0.x, vCenter Server 8.0u2, and ESXi host 8.0u2 on the target site when the target is an on-premises SDDC.
- Enhanced mode replications require TCP network connectivity on ports 31031 and 32032 from the ESXi hosts on which the replicated VMs are running to the ESXi hosts of the cluster containing the target datastore. Make sure your firewall settings are adjusted accordingly.
- To enable the quiescing of virtual machines that run Linux guest OS, install the latest version of VMware Tools on each Linux machine that you plan to replicate.