In first part of this series vSphere Replication Introduction we have discussed what is vSphere Replication and how it works. We also discussed the architecture and components involved and saw the possible use cases where vSphere Replication can be used.

In this post we will look on how to setup lab for deployment of vSphere Replication and what pieces of infrastructure should be ready before we start using vSphere Replication.

I am going to use cross site replication in my lab so here is my lab components:

Hardware Component

I have a Dell M4800 Mobile workstation laptop with 32 GB of RAM and i7 Quad Core processor. I am running all the lab components inside VMware Workstation.

My Lab Components

1. I installed Server 2012 R2 Datacenter edition as my base OS. This machine will act as my Domain Controller as well as DNS Server (AD Integrated DNS).
2. I have another Server 2012 R2 Datacenter edition installed in VMware Workstation.

I am quite a new candidate to vSphere Replication and have seen quite a few appliances deployed in our production environment as we are offering Disaster Recovery to Cloud (DR2C) services to our customers in vCloud Air and often have to troubleshoot issues related to replication.

So to understand how disaster recovery works and what should be the area we should be looking for while troubleshooting replication issues, I decided to try my hand on learning and deploying vSphere Replication in my lab.

So let’s begin with understanding what is vSphere Replication and its architecture and what components are involved in setting up disaster recovery environment.

What is vSphere Replication?

Earlier vSphere Replication was a feature of Site Recovery Manager (SRM) that automates the failover of virtual machines to a recovery site. vSphere Replication enables the replication of virtual machines (VMs) at the virtual layer instead of at the storage layer, as was required with earlier versions of vSphere and SRM.… Read More