5.5

7 Select a replication destination for each media device for the virtual machine.
The next pages are created dynamically depending on the media devices installed on the virtual
machine. They might include multiple virtual drives, all of which you can configure individually.
Configurable settings include whether the virtual drive is replicated, the virtual drive's replication
destination, and information about how the replicated virtual drive is configured. If the disk is to be
replicated, select a replication destination for the disk before proceeding.
8 Accept the automatic assignment of a vSphere Replication server or select a particular server on the
target site.
9 Review the settings and click Finish to establish replication.
Configure Replication for Multiple Virtual Machines
You can configure replication for multiple virtual machines using the multi-VM configure replication
wizard.
When you configure replication, you set a recovery point objective (RPO) to determine the period of time
between replications. For example, an RPO of 1 hour seeks to ensure that a virtual machine loses no more
than 1 hour of data during the recovery. For smaller RPOs, less data is lost in a recovery, but more network
bandwidth is consumed keeping the replica up to date.
Every time that a virtual machine reaches its RPO target, vSphere Replication records approximately 3800
bytes of data in the vCenter Server events database. If you set a low RPO period, this can quickly create a
large volume of data in the database. To avoid creating large volumes of data in the vCenter Server events
database, limit the number of days that vCenter Server retains event data. See Configure Database Retention
Policy in the vCenter Server and Host Management Guide. Alternatively, set a higher RPO value.
NOTE You cannot use the SRM interface to configure replications that use point in time (PIT) snapshots. To
enable PIT snapshots, configure replication of virtual machines by using the vSphere Web Client. See
Configure Replication for Multiple Virtual Machines in vSphere Replication Administration.
To recover a virtual machine from an older PIT snapshot, you must manually revert the virtual machine to
that snapshot after the recovery. See “Recover a Point-in-Time Snapshot of a Virtual Machine,” on page 46.
vSphere Replication guarantees crash consistency amongst all the disks that belong to a virtual machine. If
you use VSS quiescing, you might obtain a higher level of consistency. The available quiescing types are
determined by the virtual machine's operating system. See Compatibility Matrixes for vSphere Replication
5.5 for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) quiescing support for Windows virtual machines.
You can configure virtual machines to replicate to a Virtual SAN datastore on the target site. See Using
vSphere Replication with Virtual SAN in Site Recovery Manager Installation and Configuration for the
limitations when using vSphere Replication with Virtual SAN.
NOTE vSphere 5.5 includes Virtual SAN as an experimental feature. You can perform testing with Virtual
SAN, but it is not supported for use in a production environment. See the release notes for this release for
information about how to enable Virtual SAN.
Prerequisites
To replicate virtual machines using vSphere Replication, you must deploy the vSphere Replication
appliance at the source and target sites. You must power on the virtual machines to begin replication.
Before you replicate multiple machines, configure datastore mappings in the SRM user interface. You
configure the mappings so that information is available to SRM regarding the target datastore destinations
for replication.
Procedure
1 On the vSphere Web Client Home page, click VMs and Templates.
Site Recovery Manager Administration
24 VMware, Inc.