To use the enhanced replication capabilities with VMware Site Recovery, you must reconfigure your existing replication to use Enhanced replication mode.

When using VMware Site Recovery with enhanced replication, enhanced replication distributes the replications on all available hosts in the target cluster. Re-balancing of the workload occurs automatically every 30 minutes. The number of replicated VMs per host on the target site depends on, but is not limited to the virtual machines disks size, number of disks, change rate, and RPO.

Prerequisites

  • Enhanced replications require both sites of the pairing to be with a minimum version of vSphere Replication 8.8.0.x.
  • Enhanced replications require minimum versions vSphere Replication 8.8.0.x and SDDC version 1.22.0.11 on the target site when the target is a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC.
  • Enhanced replications require minimum versions vSphere Replication 8.8.x, vCenter Server 8.0u2, and ESXi host 8.0u2 on the target site when the target is an on-premises SDDC.
  • vSphere Replication 8.8 and later requires network encryption for Enhanced replications.
  • Enhanced 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.
  • Enhanced replications with an RPO lower than 5 minutes require vCenter Server 8.0u1 and later and an ESXi host version 8.0u1 and later for on-premises SDDCs, and SDDC version 1.22.0.11 or later for VMware Cloud on AWS.

Procedure

  1. On the Site Recovery home tab, select a site pair and click View Details.
  2. Click the Replications tab, and select a replication or replications from Outgoing or Incoming.
  3. Click Reconfigure.
  4. Change the vSphere Replication server to Enhanced replication and click Next.
  5. (Optional) On the Target datastore page, select a datastore on which to replicate files and click Next.
    When replicating multiple virtual machines, you can configure a different target datastore for each virtual machine.
  6. (Optional) On the Replication settings page, use the RPO slider to set the acceptable period for which data can be lost in the case of a site failure.
    The available RPO range is from 1 minutes to 24 hours.
  7. (Optional) To save multiple replication instances that can be converted to snapshots of the source virtual machine during recovery, select Enable point in time instances and adjust the number of instances to keep.
    Note: You can keep up to 24 instances for a virtual machine. For example, if you configure vSphere Replication to keep 6 replication instances per day, the maximum number of days you can set is 4 days.

    The number of replication instances that vSphere Replication keeps depends on the configured retention policy, but also requires that the RPO period is short enough for these instances to be created. Because vSphere Replication does not verify whether the RPO settings will create enough instances to keep, and does not display a warning message if the instances are not enough, you must ensure that you set vSphere Replication to create the instances that you want to keep. For example, if you set vSphere Replication to keep 6 replication instances per day, the RPO period must not exceed 4 hours, so that vSphere Replication can create 6 instances in 24 hours.

  8. (Optional) Select the quiescing method for the guest operating system of the source virtual machine.
    Note: Quiescing options are available only for virtual machines that support quiescing. vSphere Replication does not support VSS quiescing on Virtual Volumes.
  9. (Optional) Select Enable network compression for VR data.
    Compressing the replication data that is transferred through the network saves network bandwidth and might help reduce the amount of buffer memory used on the vSphere Replication server. However, compressing and decompressing data requires more CPU resources on both the source site and the server that manages the target datastore.
  10. Select Enable network encryption for VR data.
    If you configure a replication of an encrypted VM, this option is automatically turned on and cannot be deactivated.
  11. (Optional) Select Enable DataSets replication.
  12. On the Ready to complete page, review your settings, and click Finish.