Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Using vSphere Replication
The ability to make a copy of your important data and workloads at a remote location is often
one of the top priorities for business management. They realize that recovering important
workloads and data is crucial to keeping the business operating, and the quicker they can be up
and running, the less productivity they potentially lose. As discussed in the previous section,
“Recovering from Disasters,” replicating data from your primary location to a secondary loca-
tion can be performed using SAN-based replication, but this can be a costly solution. The other
option available to VMware administrators is the built-in vSphere Replication.
vSphere Replication was introduced in SRM 5.0 and decoupled as a new feature in vSphere
version 5.1, and it has been further improved in version 5.5. It provides VM-based replication
and recovery at the hypervisor level. This means that there are no external requirements to pro-
vide the replication, apart from network connectivity between two locations. Available for every
license level above Essentials Plus, vSphere Replication can copy VMs within the same cluster or
to a different cluster, which means your target and source could be either the same vCenter or a
completely different vCenter on the other side of the country! Before we show you how to con-
i gure vSphere Replication, let us explain the architecture and limitations around this feature.
As mentioned earlier, vSphere Replication can be coni gured regardless of the underlying
storage system or protocol. It will work with locally attached SATA, Fibre Channel SANs, or
IP-based NASs. vSphere Replication has no preference of type and is even l exible enough for
the source and destination to differ in storage coni guration, as shown in Figure 7.34.
Figure 7.34
vSphere Replication
can work between
datacenters, as long
as there is a net-
work joining them.
Source
Destination
Asynchronous
replication
vCenter
vCenter
VR appliance
VR appliance
HA cluster
Shared
datastore
Local datastore
Local datastore
