You can use vSphere Replication to configure a replication from cloud to your local site.

If your local site was recovered from a major breakdown and you must restore it, or you cannot configure a reverse replication, you can configure a new replication from cloud to synchronize data from the cloud site to your local site.

Note:

You can configure a replication from cloud for only one virtual machine in a vApp.

Prerequisites

  • Verify that the cloud site is available and connected to the local site. See Connect to a Cloud Provider Site.

  • Verify that the list of incoming replications does not contain a replication for the virtual machine that you want to configure for a replication from cloud. See Stop a Replication from Cloud.

Procedure

  1. Log in to the vSphere Client or vSphere Web Client.
  2. On the home page, click Site Recovery and click Open Site Recovery.
  3. On the Site Recovery home page, select the site pair to the cloud provider site and click View Details.
  4. On the Replications tab, click Reverse replications, and click the Create new replication icon.

    The Configure Replication wizard starts.

  5. Select the cloud provider site where the virtual machine is located and the virtual machines that you want to protect, and click Next.
  6. Accept the automatic assignment of a vSphere Replication server or select a particular server on the local site and click Next.
  7. On the Target datastore page, select a datastore on which to replicate files.

    When replicating multiple virtual machines, you can configure a different target datastore for each virtual machine.

  8. (Optional) Select the Select seeds check box.

    Replication seeds can reduce the network traffic during the initial full synchronization, but unintended use of replication seeds might lead to data loss.

  9. Click Next.
  10. (Optional) On the Select seed page, review the suggested replication seeds and change them if necessary.
  11. Select the The selected seeds are correct check box and click Next.
  12. 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 15 minutes to 24 hours.

  13. (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.

  14. (Optional) Enable quiescing 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.

  15. (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.

  16. Click Next.
  17. 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. A progress bar indicates that the source virtual machine is being configured for replication.

If the configuration operation completes successfully, the replication task appears in the list of reverse replications on the Replications tab.

Note:

If a replication source virtual machine is powered off, the replication starts after you power on the virtual machine.

What to do next

On the Replications tab, under Forward replications and Reverse replications, you can view the status of each replication. For more information on the replication status, see Monitoring the Status of Replications.

Note:

You can pause, resume, sync, test, recover, and stop replications from cloud, but you cannot reconfigure or move these replications between vSphere Replication servers.