vsphere replication

Install and Configure vSphere Replication with SRM 8.3 on vSphere 7

Duncan Epping · Apr 2, 2020 ·

I haven’t really done much with vSphere Replication and Site Recovery Manager (SRM) in the past years as my main focus has been vSAN. I figured I would get two clusters up and running and install and configure both vSphere Replication as well as SRM on top of vSphere 7. Although the installation and configuration are pretty straight forward, there are a few steps which are important. Below the steps I took to get things up and running.

Deploy the vSphere Replication appliance in both clusters
Deploy the Site Recovery Manager appliance in both clusters
Go to “https://<ip of vSphere Replication appliance>:5480” in first cluster
- username: root
- password: what ever you specified!
Click on “Configuration Page” link
Specify Password of vCenter Server in the Password field
Click “Apply Network Settings”
Click “Save and Restart Service”
Accept the SSL Certificate
Repeat the above for the second cluster!
Now go to your vSphere H5 Client and wait until the vSphere Replicated tasks are completed
Log out of the vSphere H5 Client and log back in for both clusters
Now go to the first cluster / vCenter server
Now click on “Menu” and then “Site Recovery”
Click “open Site Recovery”
Click “New Site Pair”
Fill out the details of the second vCenter Server
Click Next and Connect if you get a security alert and are certain this is the correct vCenter instance
Select the correct listed vCenter instance and vSphere Replication appliance
Click Next and Finish, now you will see a task within vCenter that states “Connect vSphere Replication Sites”
Now you have vSphere Replication running and you can replicate VMs from one location to the other manually if and when desired.

vSAN 7.0 UI enhancements for vSphere Replication

Duncan Epping · Mar 24, 2020 ·

I have been playing around with vSphere / vSAN 7.0 the past week or so. Today I configured vSphere Replication between two vCenter Server instances with vSphere / vSAN 7.0. I wanted to check out the enhancements that were introduced in the UI. Although they are relatively small enhancements, I feel they will make your life as an administrator much easier. The problem people had with VMs which were replicated using vSphere Replication is the fact that the vSphere Client didn’t show much information about the objects. You could not see how much capacity was consumed, or even to what the object belonged to. vSphere 7.0 changes this! When you go to the vSAN section under Monitoring you can now in the “Virtual Objects” pane not only see the objects, you can also easily identify to which VM they belong and you can easily see the different “point in time” copies associated with the VM.

On top of that, the Capacity overview also shows you these details under “User Objects”. Interested in what it looks like? Just watch the demo below, it is just under 2 minutes, a nice quick to-the-point overview of what was introduced for vSphere Replication in vSAN 7.0

VMworld Reveals: Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity enhancements! (#HCI2894BU and #HBI3109BU)

Duncan Epping · Sep 4, 2019 ·

At VMworld, various cool new technologies were previewed. In this series of articles, I will write about some of those previewed technologies. Unfortunately, I can’t cover them all as there are simply too many. This article is about enhancements in the business continuity/disaster recovery space. There were 2 sessions where futures were discussed, namely HCI2894BU and HBI3109BU. Please note that this is a brief summary of those sessions, and these are discussing a Technical Preview, these features/products may never be released, and these previews do not represent a commitment of any kind, and this feature (or it’s functionality) is subject to change. Now let’s dive into it, what can you expect for disaster recovery in the future?

The first session I watched was HCI2894BU, this was all about Site Recovery Manager. I think the most interesting part is the future support for Virtual Volumes (vVols) for Site Recovery Manager. It may sound like something simple, but it isn’t. When the version of SRM ships that supports vVols keep in mind that your vVol capable storage system also needs to support it. At day 1 HPe Nimble, HPe 3PAR and Pure Storage will support it and Dell EMC and NetApp are actively working on support. The requirements are that the storage system needs to be vVols 2.0 compliant and support VASA 3.0. Before they dove into the vVols implementation, some history was shared and the current implementation. I found it interesting to know that SRM has over 25.000 customers and has protected more than 3.000.000 workloads over the last decade.

vSphere Replication 6.5, 5 minute RPO for ALL!

Duncan Epping · Nov 16, 2016 ·

I just noticed the following in the vSphere Replication 6.5 release notes which I felt was worth sharing:

5-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO) support for additional data store types – This version of vSphere Replication extends support for the 5 minute RPO setting to the following new data stores: VMFS 5, VMFS 6, NFS 4.1, NFS 3, VVOL and VSAN 6.5. This allows customers to replicate virtual machine workloads with an RPO setting as low as 5-minutes between these various data store options.

We have had this for vSAN in specific for a while now, but I hadn’t realized yet that we were enabling this for all sorts of datastores in this release. Definitely a great reason to move up to vSphere 6.5 and re-evaluate which VMs can do with a 5 minute RPO and use this great replication mechanism that just ships with vSphere for free! More info found in the release notes here.

If you like to know more about the 6.5 release visit this page with the links to all docs/downloads by William Lam.

Can I select VSAN as my placeholder datastore with SRM?

Duncan Epping · Jun 13, 2016 ·

I received a question today about SRM, vSphere Replication and VSAN. The current documentation for SRM says the following:

Do not select as placeholder datastores any datastores that you use as the replication target datastore for vSphere Replication.

The question was, what about when using VSAN? As with VSAN as the source and destination datastore I usually only have 1 datastore. What do I select as my placeholder datastore then? Well with VSAN the situation is different. When using VSAN the placeholder datastore selected can be the VSAN datastore where the VMs are also replicated to. This is a gap in our current documentation, and we will make sure to get this updated asap.