To use the enhanced replication capabilities with vSphere Replication, you must reconfigure your existing replication to use Enhanced replication mode.

Prerequisites

  • Enhanced replications require minimum versions vSphere Replication 9.0.x, vCenter Server 8.0u2, and ESXi host 8.0u2 on the target site when the target is an on-premises SDDC.
  • vSphere Replication 9.0 requires network encryption for Enhanced replications.
  • Enhanced replications require TCP network connectivity on ports 31031 and 32032 from the ESXi hosts on which the replicated VMs are running to the ESXi hosts of the cluster containing the target datastore. Make sure your firewall settings are adjusted accordingly.

Procedure

  1. On the Site Recovery home tab, select a site pair and click View Details.
  2. Click the Replications tab, and select a replication or replications from Outgoing or Incoming.
  3. Click Reconfigure.
  4. Change the vSphere Replication server to Enhanced replication and click Next.
  5. (Optional) On the Target datastore page, select a datastore on which to replicate files and click Next.
    When replicating multiple virtual machines, you can configure a different target datastore for each virtual machine.
  6. (Optional) 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.
  7. (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.

  8. (Optional) 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. vSphere Replication does not support VSS quiescing on vSphere Virtual Volumes.
  9. (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.
  10. Select Enable network encryption for VR data.
    Enhanced vSphere Replication requires network encryption.
  11. (Optional) Select Enable DataSets replication.
  12. On the Ready to complete page, review your settings, and click Finish.