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alienjoker
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Clone VM between Virtual Center instances in Linked Mode

Hi all,

We currently have 2 instances of vCentre (in Linked Mode) - 1 at primary site, 1 at DR.

We're looking to replicate some of our VMs to the secondary site for backups, but using standard cloning options, it does not present the DR as a destination.

One of the options I've thought of would be to create the VMX and config at the DR site (with a 1MB VMDK file as a start point) and then setup a script to delete the previous vmdk and then snapshot and then scp the new VMDK file into the new VM directory.

Anyone else trying anything similar/got any better suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

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3 Replies
schlipac
Contributor
Contributor

Just throwing this out there, what we did was setup an NFS mount visible to a host (or hosts) each in both VC's at two sites running in Linked Mode.

Do a hot clone to template to the NFS mount point, then re-register the Template on a host in VC on the other site, remove the template from the primary site.

Then you have a Template (snapshot) ready to be converted to full VM on storage and a host at that other site.

You wouldn't need NFS perse, just storage visible to Hosts in both VC's...

The other way would be vRanger.... snapshots stored on a mirrored LUN...

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weinstein5
Immortal
Immortal

Linked mode really is not intended for DR - it is designed so that you can manage mutiple VC environments from one connection/login - each VC environment acts independently.

As the other poster indicated using an NFS datastore that is accessible from hosts in both VC environments might allow you to clone -

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AntonVZhbankov
Immortal
Immortal

Veeam Backup & Replication would be a good choice to replicate VMs to remote datacenter.


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