SRM+vSphere Replication+Reprotect Process

[JoaquinC]

Hello

This is the scenario, vSphere Replication to replicate VMs from site A to B, VMs protected with SRM

When a recovery plan is executed, VMs are switched over and then we can reprotect the VMs to reverse de replication and protection, so now the recovey site becomes protected site and viceversa.

During the reprotection process the data of the VMs that were in the old protected site seems to get deleted (new recovery site) , so vpshere replication is going to start a initial sync from the  new protected site to the new recovery site.

I would like to confirm:

Is the VM data in the old protected site (new recovery site) actually deleted from the datastore during the reprotection?

if it gets completely deleted, Is there anything that can be done in SRM to use the information of the VM in the old protected site (new recovery site after recovery plan) as seeds instead deleting it and start an intial sync during the reprotection? so replication takes less time for huge VMs

Any help to understand a little bit better what SRM+Reprotec does would be appreciated

Thank you, regards

[ashilkrishnan · Accepted solution]

Hi Joaquin,

During re-protect, vSphere replication does not delete the disks from original protected site and instead it will use them as seeds.

How Site Recovery Manager Reprotects Virtual Machines with vSphere Replication

Status would reflect as full sync, however it does not transfer any data at this stage. It performs checksum operations against existing disks to determine which blocks are out of sync and then only replicate recent changes. vSphere Replication must read the entire contents of both the source and target virtual disk files. This operation can be very time consuming and is a expected behavior when using vSphere replication.

Refer this question 'What are the replication and synchronization types in VMware vSphere Replication?'  at --> vSphere Replication Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) - The current version of this doc has moved to:...

I hope that helps

[JoaquinC]

Hi Ashilkrishnan

Thanks for the information, that clarifies my doubt.

What was confusing to me is that once VMs are reprotected and everything is reversed, vSphere Replication says is doing an Initial Sync and the definition of an initial sync in the documentation is this: Initial full sync: vSphere Replication creates an empty virtual disk at the target location and replicates all data containing blocks in the source virtual disk to the virtual disk at the target location

Now based on your comments and in the information from the link you shared I understand that even thought it says Initial Sync its mostly performing checksums

Thank you!