vSphere Replication can protect one or more virtual machines and their virtual disks by replicating them from one vCenter Server instance to another. Configure the replications with your desired settings by using the following procedure.

When you configure a replication, you set a recovery point objective (RPO) to determine the maximum data loss that you can tolerate. For example, an RPO of one hour seeks to ensure that a virtual machine loses the data for no more than one hour during the recovery. For smaller RPO values, less data is lost in a recovery, but more network bandwidth is consumed keeping the replica up to date. The RPO value affects replication scheduling, but vSphere Replication does not adhere to a strict replication schedule. See Recovery Point Objective.

vSphere Replication guarantees crash consistency among all the disks that belong to a virtual machine. If you use quiescing, you might obtain a higher level of consistency. The available quiescing types are determined by the operating system of the virtual machine. See Compatibility Matrices for vSphere Replication 8.x for Windows and Linux virtual machines.

You can configure virtual machines to replicate from and to vSAN datastores. See Using vSphere Replication with vSAN Storage for the limitations when using vSphere Replication with vSAN.

Prerequisites

  • Verify that the vSphere Replication appliance is deployed at the source and the target sites.
  • 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.
  • To enable the quiescing of virtual machines that run Linux guest OS, install the latest version of VMware Tools on each Linux machine that you plan to replicate.
  • If you want to replicate an encrypted VM or to activate the network encryption of a replication, verify that your environment meets the requirements. See Replicating Encrypted Virtual Machines.

Procedure

  1. Log in to the vSphere Client.
  2. On the home page, click Site Recovery and click Open Site Recovery.
  3. On the Site Recovery home page, select a site pair and click View Details.
  4. Click the Replications tab, select Outgoing or Incoming, and click the Create new replication icon.
  5. Accept the automatic assignment of a vSphere Replication server or select a particular server on the target site and click Next.
    To use vSphere Replication with enhanced replication, select Enhanced replication.
  6. On the Virtual machines page of the Configure Replication wizard, select the virtual machines you want to replicate and click Next.
  7. On the Target datastore page, select a datastore or a datastore cluster on which to replicate files.
    When replicating multiple virtual machines, you can configure a different target datastore for each virtual machine. You can also use different target datastores for the various disks.
    Note: All datastores that are selected as the target of the replicated disks must be read and write accessible by at least one host on the target site.

    If after configuring the replication the read and write access gets broken, the replication will get into an unrecoverable state.

    1. (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.
    2. (Optional) Select or deselect the Auto-include new disks in replication check box.
      Keep the check box selected to automatically include new disks in the replication, with the same replication configuration as the source virtual machine. Disk format for the automatically included disks is determined the following way: If all replicated disks use the Same as source format, the Same as source format is applied to the automatically included disks. If that is not the case, but all replicated disks use the same format, for example Thin provision, the same format ( Thin provision) is applied to the automatically included disks. If all replicated disks use different formats, the Same as source format is applied to the automatically included disks.

      If Auto-include new disk is deactivated, adding a new disk will cause the replication to enter an Error state until the new disk is either included or excluded from the list of the replicated disks through the Reconfigure Replication wizard. You must avoid virtual machine disk changes untill the replication is in OK state.

    3. (Optional) Activate or deactivate the Configure datastore per disk view.
      If you activate the Configure datastore per disk view, you can specify a different datastore for each disk. You can also include or exclude existing disks from replication, and you can also activate or deactivate the automatic replication of new disks. To include or exclude a new or existing disk from being replicated, select or deselect the respective disk.
    4. Click Next.
  8. (Optional) On the Replication mapping tests page, test the connectivity between all compute resources in the replication.
    1. To test the connectivity in a specific cluster pair, select a cluster pair and click Run Test.
    2. To test the connectivity in all cluster pairs, click Run All Tests.
    3. Click Next.
  9. (Optional) On the Select seed page, review the suggested replication seeds and change them if necessary.
    You can select seed files for each virtual machine disk and search for seeds by using the drop-down menu and clicking Browse.
    1. Select the The selected seeds are correct check box and click Next.
    The replica files for the disk are written in the seeds file directory.
  10. On the Replication settings page, configure the replication settings for the virtual machine.
    1. Use the RPO slider to set the acceptable period for which data can be lost if a site failure occurs.
      The available RPO range is from 5 minutes to 24 hours. If you selected Enhanced replication and have an active VMware Live Recovery subscription, the available RPO range is from 1 minute to 24 hours.
      Note: If you are using vSphere Replication in offline mode, you can set below 5 minutes RPO for the number of protected VMs in the license.
    2. (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 four 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 creates 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 six replication instances per day, the RPO period must not exceed four hours, so that vSphere Replication can create six instances in 24 hours.

    3. (Optional) Activate 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 vVOL.
    4. (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.
    5. (Optional) Activate the network encryption of the replication traffic.

      If you selected Enhanced replication, this option is automatically selected and cannot be deselected. If you configure a replication of an encrypted VM, this option is automatically selected and cannot be deselected.

    6. (Optional) Activate DataSets replication.
  11. On the Protection group page, add the virtual machines to protection group.
    You can add the VMs to an existing or new protection group.
  12. On the Ready to complete page, review the replication settings, and click Finish.

Results

vSphere Replication starts an initial full synchronization of the virtual machine files to the designated datastore on the target site.