With the release of vSphere Replication 5.8, it is now possible to replicate virtual machines from a vCenter Server environment to another vCenter Server environment and to vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. Please understand that does not mean you can replicate the same VM to both, but rather you can configure replication for a VM to one destination or the other using the same vSphere Replication 5.8 user interface. Before vSphere Replication 5.8, you could deploy version 5.5 for replication between vCenter Server environments or deploy version 5.6 for replication to vCloud Air Disaster Recovery, but not both.
I have recorded a few short videos – less than two minutes each – to demonstrate using vSphere Replication to replicate virtual machines to both a vCenter Server environment and to vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. These videos do not have audio, but it is easy to understand what is happening in each video thanks to the simple interface vSphere Replication provides us.
The first video shows configuring replication to a vCenter Server environment with a VSAN cluster. Note that when we configure replication to a VSAN datastore, it is possible to select a storage based policy that is inherited by the VM when it is recovered. In this video, we also enable multiple point in time recovery for the virtual machine. With multiple point in time enabled, it is possible to recover the virtual machine to the latest replica and then revert the virtual machine back to any one of the recovery points.
http://youtu.be/QBRrW0IoPo8
The second video shows replicating two virtual machines from the same environment to vCloud Air Disaster Recovery. As seen in the video, it is possible to select and configure replication for more than one virtual machine at the same time. At the one minute mark of the video, we switch to the vCloud Air user interface in a web browser where we can see the two virtual machines are undergoing the initial synchronization process.
http://youtu.be/6lJmlxZAOL4
Once replication has been configured, it is easy to see the list of protected virtual machines and the destinations they are being replicated to. In the example screen shot below we are replicating to two different vCenter Server environments and vCloud Air Disaster Recovery.
The last video shows the ease of recovering those two virtual machines we replicated to vCloud Air Disaster Recovery using nothing more than a web browser. Again, we are able to select multiple virtual machines and recover them concurrently.
http://youtu.be/nk6N6Kp7sWA
For more information on vSphere Replication, start here.
For more information on vCloud Air Disaster Recovery, start here.
