When configuring replication of a virtual machine, you might have noticed the option “Point in time instances” aka PIT. This setting allow for some snapshots to be maintained at the DR site for the replicated VM at certain intervals.  

During replication, vSphere Replication replicates all aspects of the virtual machine to the target site, including any potential viruses and corrupted applications. The benefit being that if a guest is corrupted, we have multiple points in time to failover from in case the corruption already replicated across sites

vSphere Replication retains a number of snapshot instances of the virtual machine on the target site based on the retention policy that you specify. vSphere Replication supports maximum of 24 snapshot instances. After you recover a virtual machine, you can revert it to a specific snapshot.

Multiple Point In Time (MPIT) recovery was first introduced in vSphere replication 5.5 and it enables an administrator to recover a virtual machine to the latest replicated copy at the target site and then revert, or “roll back,” that virtual machine to a previous point in time.

When MPIT recovery is configured, these recovery points appear as virtual machine snapshots at the target location when a virtual machine is recovered using vSphere Replication. There are no dependencies between snapshots at the source location and recovery points at the target location. A virtual machine at the source location with no snapshots can still be configured to utilize MPIT recovery with vSphere Replication.

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