In part 4, we configured replications and learned to monitor them. Now it’s time to test a virtual machine recovery!
We will connect to the disaster recovery vCenter and recover a replicated virtual machine. After the recovery test, we will reconfigure the replication by using the existing virtual machine files at destination. This will avoid a new, complete initial replication by replicating only changed blocks.
In the previous part we finished to setup our appliances. We can now start to replicate virtual machines!
In this article, we are going to configure a new replication and check how we can monitor the progress and the health of this replication.
In the previous article we deployed our appliances. Before to go live, we are going to update some settings and update the self-signed certificates with CA-signed certificates. With that done, we will connect both appliances together, which will allow replications to be configured between the appliances.
Remark: the certificate update only makes sense if you already configured CA-signed certificates for your other vSphere components (have a look here if you want to update the certificates of the vCenter Server Appliance). If you didn’t, and don’t plan to do it, just skip this step!
In the first part of our article series, we had an overview of the vSphere Replication inner workings and studied several typical implementation designs. In this second part we will deploy the vSphere Replication Appliance on two sites: the production site and the disaster recovery site.
You can certainly remember that each appliance comes with a management part and the vSphere Replication engine itself. In our scenario, only the disaster recovery site requires the two components, and the production site would be happy with the management server only. However, both components are bundled together in the appliance, therefore there will be no difference in the deployment procedure for each site. Let’s proceed!
In this first vSphere Replication article we will have an overview of the product: how does it work? What are the components? After this overview, we will show several possible vSphere Replication designs.