5.5

Connecting Source and Target Sites
Before you replicate virtual machines between two sites, you must connect the sites. If the sites use
different SSO, you must provide authentication details for the target site, including IP or FQDN , user and
password information. When connecting sites, users at both sites must have VRM remote.Manage VRM
privilege. When you connect sites that are part of the same SSO, you need to select the target site only
without providing authentication details, as you are already logged in. After connecting the sites, you can
monitor the connectivity state between them at Target Sites tab.
How vSphere Replication Works
With vSphere Replication, you can configure replication of a virtual machine from a source site to a target
site, monitor and manage the status of the replication, and recover the virtual machine at the target site.
When you configure a virtual machine for replication, the vSphere Replication agent sends changed
blocks in the virtual machine disks from the source site to the target site, where they are applied to the
copy of the virtual machine. This process occurs independently of the storage layer. vSphere Replication
performs an initial full synchronization of the source virtual machine and its replica copy. You can use
replication seeds to reduce the amount of time and bandwidth required for the initial replication.
During replication configuration, you can set a recovery point objective (RPO) and enable retention of
instances from multiple points in time (MPIT).
As administrator, you can monitor and manage the status of the replication. You can view information for
incoming and outgoing replications, source and target site status, replication issues, and for warnings and
errors.
When you manually recover a virtual machine, vSphere Replication creates a copy of the virtual machine
connected to the replica disk, but does not connect any of the virtual network cards to port groups. You
can review the recovery and status of the replica virtual machine and attach it to the networks. You can
recover virtual machines at different points in time, such as the last known consistent state.
vSphere Replication presents the retained instances as ordinary virtual machine snapshots to which you
can revert the virtual machine.
vSphere Replication stores replication configuration data in its embedded database. You can also
configure vSphere Replication to use an external database.
You can replicate a virtual machine between two sites. vSphere Replication is installed on both source
and target sites. Only one vSphere Replication appliance is deployed on each vCenter Server. You can
deploy additional vSphere Replication Servers.
VMware vSphere Replication Administration
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