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Table Of Contents
Overview of
VMware vSphere Replication 2
VMware vSphere Replication is an extension to VMware vCenter Server that provides hypervisor-based
virtual machine replication and recovery.
vSphere Replication is an alternative to storage-based replication. It protects virtual machines from partial
or complete site failures by replicating the virtual machines between the following sites:
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From a source site to a target site
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Within a single site from one cluster to another
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From multiple source sites to a shared remote target site
vSphere Replication provides several benefits as compared to storage-based replication.
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Data protection at lower cost per virtual machine.
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A replication solution that allows flexibility in storage vendor selection at the source and target sites.
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Overall lower cost per replication.
You can use vSphere Replication with the vCenter Server Appliance or with a standard vCenter Server
installation. You can have a vCenter Server Appliance on one site and a standard vCenter Server
installation on the other.
With vSphere Replication, you can replicate virtual machines from a source datacenter to a target site
quickly and efficiently.
You can deploy additional vSphere Replication servers to meet your load balancing needs.
After you set up the replication infrastructure, you can choose the virtual machines to be replicated at a
different recovery point objective (RPO). You can enable multi-point in time retention policy to store more
than one instance of the replicated virtual machine. After recovery, the retained instances are available as
snapshots of the recovered virtual machine.
You can use VMware Virtual SAN datastores as target datastores and choose destination storage profiles
for the replica virtual machine and its disks when configuring replications.
Note VMware Virtual SAN is a fully supported feature of vSphere 5.5 Update 1 and later.
You can configure all vSphere Replication features in the vSphere Web Client. You can manage sites
monitor the status of a replication through the replication management and monitoring dashboard.
VMware, Inc.
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