8.1
Table Of Contents
- vSphere Replication for Disaster Recovery to Cloud
- Contents
- About Disaster Recovery to Cloud
- Disaster Recovery to Cloud System Requirements and Compatibility
- Installing and Configuring vSphere Replication to Cloud
- Installing vSphere Replication for Disaster Recovery to Cloud
- Upgrading vSphere Replication from Earlier Product Versions
- Configure the NTP Synchronization in Your Environment
- How vSphere Replication Connects to Cloud
- Configuring the Connection to the Cloud
- Connect to a Cloud Provider Site
- Reconfiguring a Site Pair and Breaking a Site Pair
- Select Recovery Networks on the Target Virtual Data Center
- Select Recovery Networks from Cloud to the Local Site
- Disable the Automatic Export of MAC Addresses During Replication
- Cloud Connection States
- Reconnect to a Cloud Provider Site
- Replicating Virtual Machines to Cloud
- Reconfiguring Replications to the Cloud
- Recovering Virtual Machines to Cloud
- Configuring Replications from Cloud
- Recovering Virtual Machines from Cloud
- Monitoring and Managing Replications in vSphere Replication
What to do next
On the Replications tab, under Forward replications and Reverse replications, you can view the
status of each replication. For more information on the replication status, see Monitoring the Status of
Replications.
Using Replication Seeds for Replications to Cloud
For each new replication that you configure, an initial full synchronization operation is performed. During
this operation, vSphere Replication copies the whole data from the source virtual machine to a
placeholder vApp on the target site.
If the source virtual machine is too big, or the bandwidth of your network connection to the cloud is too
low, the initial full sync might take a long time. Therefore, you might choose to copy the source virtual
machine to the target site by using removable media, or other means of data transfer. Then you can
configure a replication and use the virtual machine copy on the target site as a replication seed. When a
replication is configured to use a seed vApp, vSphere Replication does not copy the whole source virtual
machine to the target site. Instead, it copies to the seed vApp only the different blocks between the
source virtual machine and the seed.
Note vSphere Replication stores the replication data in the seed vApp. No copies of the seed vApp are
created. Therefore, a seed vApp can be used for only one replication.
Creating Seed vApps in the Cloud
Seed vApps on the target site can be created in the following ways.
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Offline data transfer: You can export a virtual machine as an OVF package and let a Cloud service
administrator import the package in your cloud organization.
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Clone a virtual machine: A virtual machine in the org virtual data center can be cloned to create a
seed vApp. vSphere Replication calculates checksum and exchanges the different blocks from the
replication source to the seed vApp.
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Copy over the network: A source virtual machine can be copied to the cloud organization by using
means other than vSphere Replication to copy the initial source data to the target site.
Note The size and number of disks, and their assignment to disk controllers and bus nodes must match
between the replication source and the seed virtual machine. For example, if the replication source
machine has two disks of 2 GB each, one of them assigned to SCSI controller 0 at bus number 0, and the
second one assigned to SCSI controller 1 at bus number 2, the seed vApp that you use must have
exactly the same hardware configuration - 2 disks of 2 GB each, at SCSI 0:0 and at SCSI 1:2.
vSphere Replication for Disaster Recovery to Cloud
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