How to configure Vsphere Replication 5.1

Steps Involved:

1. Download the replication appliance from vmware.com/downloads.

2. Burn it into a dvd (optional).

3. With the vSphere Client, install via ovf. The appliance will default to 2 cpus and 4 gbs of ram. It will have two virtual disks, a 2gb disk and a 10gb disk. It is based on Suse Linux 11.

4. The wizard will ask for network related settings and a password. I used vmware1! for the root account. It did not have the same requirements as the vmware data protection appliance.

5. Boot up the appliance.

6. Connect to the appliance through your browser. Use https and point to port 5480.

7. Log in as root with the password selected by you in step 4.

8. Four tabs will appear (VR, Network, Update and System). Nothing to change on the first tab. The Network tab allows you to change the network related settings of the appliance. The third tab allows you to view the version of the appliance and update it. The system tab allows you to reboot or shutdown the appliance.

9. Connect to the vcenter server using your browser. Use https and port 9443. Log in to the web client. You will notice the client plugin for replication configured automatically.

10. Click on the Replication tab in the web client. Take a look at your settings.

11. Click on the vcenter server, click on VMs and Templates, expand your vcenter server and datacenter and find the virtual machine to be replicated.

12. Right click on the virtual machine (xp1 in my case) and select All vSphere Replication Actions.

13. Select Configure Replication.

14. In the wizard, select your vcenter as the Target Site.

15. Select a different datastore as the Target Location.

16. Lower the RPO time to 15 minutes to speed up this test. Four hours is the default.

17. As soon as you finish the previous step, verify that a new folder exist on the second datastore. This folder contains the shadow vm, which is two files (the .vmdk and -flat.vmdk).

18. Wait a few minutes, log into the virtual machine and make some changes for testing. Create folders, remove folders, add software; your choice.

19. Wait some time and notice how new files appear in the folder of the shadow vm.

Recovery Steps:

1. Connect to the vcenter server via the web client.

2. Click on Vsphere Replication.

3. Click on Sites.

4. Select your site.

5. Click on Incoming Replications.

6. Right click on the virtual machine to be recovered.

7. Select Recover.

8. Recover the virtual machine in a different folder.

Note: This task was done without shutting down the virtual machine to begin with. The new vm was recovered in a folder called Recovered VMs. The virtual machine boots up without network connectivity to prevent network conflicts.