vSphere Replication Operations Run Slowly as the Number of Replications Increases

As you increase the number of virtual machines that you replicate, vSphere Replication operations can run more slowly.

Problem

Response times for vSphere Replication operations can increase as you replicate more virtual machines. You possibly experience recovery operation timeouts or failures for a few virtual machines, and RPO violations.

Cause

Every virtual machine in a datastore generates regular read and write operations. Configuring vSphere Replication on those virtual machines adds another read operation to the regular read and write operations, which increases the I/O load on the storage. The performance of vSphere Replication depends on the I/O load of the virtual machines that you replicate and on the capabilities of the storage hardware. If the load generated by the virtual machines, combined with the extra I/O operations that vSphere Replication introduces, exceeds the capabilities of your storage hardware, you might experience slow response times.

Solution

When running vSphere Replication, if response times are greater than 30 ms, reduce the number of virtual machines that you replicate to the datastore. Alternatively, increase the capabilities of your hardware. If you suspect that the I/O load on the storage is an issue and you are using VMware vSAN storage, monitor the I/O latency by using the monitoring tool in the vSAN interface.