5.8

Table Of Contents
Replicating Virtual Machines to Cloud 4
You can congure replications from vSphere environments to cloud for a single virtual machine or for
multiple virtual machines.
To replicate virtual machines to cloud, you must deploy the vSphere Replication 5.6 appliance at the source
site, and your cloud provider must enable replications to the cloud in your cloud organization.
The source and target sites must be connected so that you can congure replications. Though you can create
connections to the cloud while you congure replications, the good practice is to create cloud connections
before you start the Congure Replication wizard. See “Connect to a Cloud Provider Site,” on page 16.
To avoid copying big volumes of data between the source site and the cloud over a network connection, you
can create replication seeds on the target site and congure replication tasks to use them. See “Using
Replication Seeds,” on page 25.
For each replication task, you can set a recovery point objective (RPO) to a certain time interval depending
on your data protection needs. vSphere Replication applies all changes made to replication source virtual
machines to their replicas on the target site. This process reoccurs at the RPO interval that you set.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“Congure a Replication to Cloud for a Single Virtual Machine,” on page 21
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“Congure a Cloud Replication Task for Multiple Virtual Machines,” on page 23
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“Using Replication Seeds,” on page 25
Configure a Replication to Cloud for a Single Virtual Machine
To start replicating virtual machines to your cloud organization, you congure replication from the source
site by using the vSphere Web Client.
When you congure 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 Congure Database Retention
Policy in the vCenter Server and Host Management Guide. Alternatively, set a higher RPO value.
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
5.8 for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) quiescing support for Windows virtual machines.
VMware, Inc.
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