To start replicating virtual machines to your cloud organization, you configure replication from the source site by using the vSphere Web Client.

About this task

When you configure replication, you set a recovery point objective (RPO) to determine the period of time between replications. For example, an RPO of 1 hour seeks to ensure that a virtual machine loses no more than 1 hour of data during the recovery. For smaller RPOs, less data is lost in a recovery, but more network bandwidth is consumed keeping the replica up to date.

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 avoid creating large volumes of data 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.

vSphere Replication guarantees crash consistency amongst all the disks that belong to a virtual machine. If you use VSS quiescing, you might obtain a higher level of consistency. The available quiescing types are determined by the virtual machine's operating system. See Compatibility Matrixes for vSphere Replication 5.8 for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) quiescing support for Windows virtual machines.

Prerequisites

  • Verify that the vSphere Replication appliance is deployed in your environment.

  • Verify that the Disaster Recovery to Cloud service is enabled in your environment and in the target cloud organization.

  • Configure a connection to the cloud organization to which you want to replicate data. See Connect to a Cloud Provider Site.

  • If you plan to use replication seeds, verify that you read and understand the information in topic Using Replication Seeds.

Procedure

  1. On the vSphere Web Client Home page, click VMs and Templates.
  2. In the inventory tree, right-click the virtual machine that you want to replicate and select All vSphere Replication Actions > Configure Replication.

    The Configure Replication wizard opens.

  3. Select Replicate to a cloud provider and click Next.
  4. Select the target site to which you want to replicate the virtual machine.

    • If you have created a connection to the cloud provider, select the target virtual datacenter from the list and click Next.

      If the status of the connection is Not authenticated, you must provide credentials to authenticate with the cloud organization. If you have not selected which networks on the target site to use for recovery operations, you are prompted to.

    • If you have not created a connection to the cloud provider, click New Provider VDC and click Next.

      Follow the on-screen prompts to connect to the target cloud organization.

  5. On the Target location page, select where to store replication data.

    Option

    Procedure

    Use storage policy

    From the drop-down menu, select the storage policy to use for replication placement and click Next.

    Use replication seeds

    1. Click Next to navigate to the list of available seed vApps on the target site.

    2. Select a seed vApp from the list, and click Next.

    Note:

    If you remove a disk from a replication source virtual machine, the seed disk is not deleted from the datastore on the target site.

  6. (Optional) On the Replication options page, 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.

  7. On the Recovery settings page, use the RPO slider or the time spinners to set the acceptable period for which data can be lost in the case of a site failure.

    The available RPO range is from 15 minutes to 24 hours.

  8. Click Next.
  9. On the Ready to complete page, review the replication settings, and click Finish.

Results

A virtual machine configuration task appears in the Recent Tasks list in the upper right of the vSphere Web Client. A progress bar indicates that the source virtual machine is being configured for replication.

If the configuration completes successfully, the replication task that you created appears in the list of outgoing replications on the vSphere Replication tab under Monitor.

If the source virtual machine is powered on, the initial sync-up operation starts after the configuration . If the source virtual machine is powered off, the initial sync starts when you power on the virtual machine.

What to do next

On the vSphere Replication tab under Monitor, you can check the status of each replication. See States of Replication Tasks.

You can click a replication task in the list and use the tabs in the bottom of the vSphere Web Client to view details about the replication, the recovery status, and the latest performed test, if test results are not cleaned up yet.