Migrate or Clone VMs to new vCenter at other site

[johnaf]

Hello,

We are preparing to move our environment to a new facility where we have installed a similar vCenter environment to our current one to where there is 1 vCenter 6.7 with 7 hosts. We have setup the Cross vCenter vMotion utility and migrated a VM to the new site as a test. Unfortunately because of the way our network was setup some time ago we have sites that need to have their network equipment upgraded before they can communicate with the new site - so once the migration completes for a VM those site will not longer be able to access it, not to mention our bandwidth is terrible.

We would like to have the ability to clone the VMs to the new site (while powered on) to basically "seed" the site and then have changes synced. Once all the VMs are synced and those sites have been upgraded then we can complete the transition (DNS changes).

Is this sort of thing possible?

Thanks,

John

[IRIX201110141]

This is called "Replication".

Regards,
Joerg

[NicolasAlauzet · Accepted solution]

VMware has a tool for that, vSphere Replication. You already have access with the basic and advanced licenses.

What is vSphere Replication? | Disaster Recovery in VM | VMware

vSphere Replication does not have a separate license as it is a feature of certain vSphere license editions.

• vSphere Essentials Plus
• vSphere Standard
• vSphere Enterprise
• vSphere Enterprise Plus

vSphere Replication Licensing

[IRIX201110141]

Often the VM Backup Software also offers VM Replication.  Its a onetime seed and than only the delta is transferred. Exactly what the OP is asking for.

Regards,
Joerg

[johnaf]

When this first came up I started looking into replication but was under the impression that we would not be able to use it so I started down the path of Corss vCenter migration and cloning.

Thanks to both of you for pointing me back to replication. I just deployed the replication appliances and have successfully migrated a VM as a test for both of our environments.