Previous vSphere Replication articles from the series:

1.Deploy and Configure vSphere Replication 8.4


How to create a Replication

  1. Create a site-to-site connection. Launch vSphere Replication on the vCenter source by clicking in the shortcut Site Recovery, then click Open Site Recovery.
    It will open vSphere Replication from vCenter.

Next, click in New Site Pair to create a Replication between sites.

Note: As we can see in the next image, a Replication site is already created by default. This is internal replication on the vCenter.

As we explain above and in the first article, with this Replication, we can replicate VMs inside of the same vCenter, between Clusters and Datastores.

Next, connect to your target PSC. If the target has an embedded PSC, then is your vCenter. If the target has an external PSC, then you need to add your PSC and credentials so that vSphere Replication can pair to the target PSC

Next, vSphere Replication source recognize target vCenter and the target vSphere Replication and click Next.

After pair is created, you now have access to target vCenter. It’s time to create the VMs replication and select which VMs will be replicated.


Create VMs Replication.

  1. In the vSphere Replication click Menu and select the target vCenter.

2. Next, click the Replications tab to open replication area.

3. Next click in Outgoing. Since we are replicating to the target, we will have an outgoing replication.

If we want to create a replication from the target to source, then we select incoming replication.

4. Next, select the VMs that you want to replicate.

Note: We do not replicate the vSphere Replication Appliance itself. It could be done, but we will not enable replication for VR.

Power off VMs are not replicated. We can add Power off VMs to the replicating list, but they will only be replicated when we Power on the VM. When we power on the VM VR automatically start replicating that VM.

5. Next is one of the essential sections on our replication process. Here is where we set our RTO and RPO for our SLAs and Disaster Recovery plan.

Like we have explained in the first part of this article, too many restore points and lower RPO have a critical impact on your Replication network and also in your environment.

So plan it carefully and use it wisely. Always check if you have network bandwidth and infrastructure resources for your RPO.

There are also extra options that we can add to our replication.

  • Network compression can reduce the bandwidth used to replicate your VMs. Enabling compression uses more CPU resources at both the source and target sites to compress and decompress the replicated data
  • Quiescing might take several minutes and might affect RPO time. Use only for VMs that are configured to support quiescing methods
  • Encryption protects VR Data against unauthorized access. Enabling encryption use more CPU resources at both the source and target sites to encrypt and decrypt the replicated data.

6. Next, check your details and click finish to create the replication.

Note: Again take into account that power off VMs will not be replicated until they are power on.

In the next image, we can see the VMs that were already replicated to the target and with 3 restores points a day.

With the last task, we finished to deploy vSphere Replication and created a replication task between to sites

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