I'm trying to setup a VM Replication scenario in which I have 3 hosts, 2 production, one DR. The DR will be offsite, with direct communications to it over VPN, so it appears to be a local host. I have one vCenter Server Appliance 5.5 instance, running ESXi 5.5 on all my hosts and the vSphere Replication Appliance 5.5. The VM's I'm trying to replicate are all production, mission critical vms. I used the instructions to do the initial replication without taking the VMs offline, meaning only the vmdk files copied over, no .vmx files, no swap files, etc.
I took the vCenter server offline and copied all the files to the DR host as well as the vSphere replication appliance. When I bring the vCenter server up, it knows it's been moved, so services don't start, nothing works.
Does anyone have any experience with deploying replication in a single vCenter Server environment? According to the help files, it can be done, but all the instructions for recovering a vm are for environments with 2 vCenter Servers. If the link is broken between the vCenter Server and the DR site, how do you bring back up the replicated vms with nothing but .vmx files? Do I need to take an outage, copy all the files over so I can just import them to the inventory of the ESX host on the DR side? The environment includes Active Directory on Windows 2008 server, and SSO is tied to that.
Any help is appreciated, thanks.
