In a typical vSphere Replication installation, the local site provides business-critical data center services. The remote site is an alternative facility to which you can migrate these services.
The local site can be any site where vCenter Server supports a critical business need. The remote site can be in another location, or in the same facility to establish a redundancy. The remote site is typically located in a facility where environmental, infrastructure, or other disturbances are unlikely to occur and affect the local site.
vSphere Replication has the following requirements for the vSphere® environments at each site:
- Ensure that each site has at least one data center.
- Ensure that the remote site has hardware, network, and storage resources that can support the same virtual machines and workloads as the local site.
- Ensure that the sites are connected by a reliable IP network.
- Ensure that the remote site accesses networks (public and private) comparable to the ones on the local site. It is not necessary for them to be in the same range of network addresses.
Connecting Local and Remote Sites
Before you replicate virtual machines between two sites, you must connect the sites. When connecting sites, users at both sites must have the privilege assigned.
When you connect sites that are part of the same vCenter Single Sign-On domain, you must select the remote site only, without providing authentication details, because you are already logged in.
When you connect sites that belong to different vCenter Single Sign-On domains, the vSphere Replication Management Server must register with the Platform Services Controller on the remote site. You must provide authentication details for the remote site, including IP or FQDN of the server where Platform Services Controller runs, and user credentials. See Configure vSphere Replication Connections.
After connecting the sites, you can monitor the connectivity state between them in the Site Recovery user interface.
