If you do not need to replicate a virtual machine, you can stop the replication of that virtual machine.

Take a note of the target datastore and the name of the replication that you are about to stop. You need this information to clean up your environment after you stop the replication.

Prerequisites

Verify that you are logged in the vSphere Web Client as a VRM virtual machine replication user or a VRM administration user. See vSphere Replication Roles Reference.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Replication Home page, go to the Monitor tab and click Incoming Replications or Outgoing Replications.
  2. Right-click a replication and select Stop.
    vSphere Replication asks you if you want to permanently stop the replication for the selected virtual machine.
    Note: The hosts and vSphere Replication server used by the replication must be accessible to stop a replication on both sites. If a host or the server is not accessible, you can force stop the replication on the accessible site by selecting Force stop replication. If you force stop the replication from Incoming Replications, you must also force stop the corresponding replication from Outgoing Replications if the source site is available. If you force stop the replication from Outgoing Replications, you can only recover or force stop the corresponding replication from Incoming Replications.
  3. Click Yes to confirm that you want to stop replicating this virtual machine.

Results

The virtual machine does not replicate to the target site.

When you stop a replication, the following operations are performed at the replication target site.
  • VMDK files are deleted from the target site datastore if the VMDK files were created when the replication was first configured.
Note: When you stop a replication, vSphere Replication does not delete the replica directory at the target datastore. As a result, stale directories remain on VMFS and NFS target datastores, and unused namespaces remain on Virtual SAN and Virtual Volume target datastores. Because the maximum number of directories and namespaces on a datastore is limited, you must manually clean them up to free resources on the datastore. See Clean Up the Target Datastore After You Stop a Replication.
  • VMDK files are not deleted and remain on the target datastore if you configured the replication to use existing disks at the target site as seeds.