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

Prerequisites

Verify that the seed vApps or VMs exist in the target site.

Before starting a replication, in the target site you must power off the seed VMs, because they are unregistered from the target VMware vCloud Director and vCenter Server inventories. If the new replication fails, the VM files and disks remain on the datastore. For the VM to appear in the inventories, locate the .vmx file of the VM, manually import the VM in the vCenter Server inventory, and import it to the VMware vCloud Director inventory.

Procedure

  1. In a Web browser, navigate to the vSphere Client and log in as an administrator.
  2. From the vSphere Client Menu, select VMs and Templates.
  3. In the Navigator pane, right-click the virtual machine and select vCloud Availability > Configure Protection.
    The New Outgoing Replication wizard opens.
  4. On the vCenter VMs page, select the virtual machines that you want to protect and click Next.
  5. On the Target VDC page, select the target virtual data center to which you want to replicate the virtual machines, and click Next.
  6. On the Seed VM page, select the vApp or VM, under Seed select the seed you want to use, and 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.
  7. On the Protection Settings page, select the settings for the replication, and click Next.
    Option Description
    Target recovery point objective (RPO) Use the slider or click the time intervals to set the acceptable period for which data can be lost in the case of a site failure. The available RPO range is from 5 minutes to 24 hours.
    Storage policy From the Storage policy drop-down menu, select the storage policy for placing the recovered VMs and for the replicated data before the recovery. For seed VMs, vCloud Availability Replicator uses the storage policy of the seed VM.
    Retention policy for point in time instances

    To preserve multiple distinct replication instances (snapshots) to which VMs can be recovered, select the 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.

    Enable quiesce

    Select the quiescing method for the guest OS of the source VM.

    Note: Quiescing is available only for VMs that support quiescing. For more information, see Guest OS Quiescing Support.
    Compress replication traffic

    Select to compress the replication data that is transferred through the network and to reduce the network traffic. However, compressing and decompressing data requires more CPU resources on both the source site and the server that manages the target datastore.

  8. On the Scheduling page, select when to start the replication and click Next.
    • Start the replication when the wizard finishes by leaving Immediately selected.
    • Schedule the start of the replication by selecting At a specific time.
  9. On the Ready to Complete page, verify that the configuration settings are correct and click Finish.

Results

In the Recent Tasks pane, an Enable replication of virtual machine task appears and displays the status of the new replication.

What to do next

You can monitor the replication task progress by clicking the Replication Tasks tab.