6.0

Replicating Virtual Machines to Cloud 4
You can configure 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 5.8 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 configure replications. Though you can create
connections to the cloud while you configure replications, the good practice is to create cloud connections
before you start the Configure Replication wizard. See “Connect to a Cloud Provider Site,” on page 14.
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 configure replication tasks to use them. See “Using
Replication Seeds for Replications to Cloud,” on page 26.
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.
You can configure replications for powered-off virtual machines, but the data synchronization begins when
the virtual machine is powered on. While the source virtual machine is powered off, the replication appears
in Not active status.
You cannot use vSphere Replication to replicate virtual machine templates.
This chapter includes the following topics:
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“Configure a Replication to Cloud for a Single Virtual Machine,” on page 21
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“Configure a Cloud Replication Task for Multiple Virtual Machines,” on page 24
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“Using Replication Seeds for Replications to Cloud,” on page 26
Configure a Replication to Cloud for a Single Virtual Machine
To start replicating virtual machines to your cloud organization, you configure replication from the source
site by using the vSphere Web Client.
When you configure replication, you set a recovery point objective (RPO) to determine the maximum data
loss that you can tolerate. For example, an RPO of 1 hour seeks to ensure that a virtual machine loses the
data for no more than 1 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 the topic How the
Recovery Point Objective Affects Replication Scheduling in the vSphere Replication Administration document.
VMware, Inc.
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