Configure vSphere Replication (+ SRM) for VMs

[tinchito7]

Hi community!

I've been tasked with mass-configuring replication of our critical VMs to our DR site using vSphere Replication.

Since there is no way I'm going to do this for ~250 VMs, I was wondering if anyone has written a workflow like this in vRO.

We are currently using vRO 7.4 so I'm a bit limited with what I can do on my own...

I managed to use the vSphere Replication plug-in to configure replication for a single VM that I manually choose, but don't know how to do this for a list of VMs (that I already have on the side).

[Next I would need to add the VM to a Protection Group, still investigating it.]

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks!

[scott28tt]

It may help others to know you've already asked about PowerCLI as a solution in another thread: Configure vSphere Replication (+ SRM) for VMs with PowerCLI

[tinchito7]

Yes Scott,

Unfortunately, it seems I had no luck solving this using PowerCLI, which would have been my preference.

[tinchito7]

Update: I managed to create a workflow that-

a. Gets a single VM and check if it has vSphere Replication configured

b. If it does, quits; if not, configures it

c. Adds the VM to a fixed Protection Group

d. Configures protection for the VM

This is exactly what I need, but in mass (250 VMs).

Having trouble working out how to use a Resource Element to create an Array of VMs and then running it through a ForEach loop.

Would appreciate some help

[marcio15]

Hi there!

Could you tell me how you managed to do that part below?

a. Gets a single VM and check if it has vSphere Replication configured

I need to do something similar. Check which VMs has replication configured through POWERCLI but so far I haven´t found anything related.

Thanks a lot!

[eoinbyrne]

You'll probably run into pain using a ResourceElement to store inventory object references. I would recommend using a CSV text file uploaded to the ResourceElement instead. Then you could use the following to load & process that list

// Assume ResourceElement contains the CSV list of VM names to be checked
var csvList = myResourceElement.getContentAsMimeAttachment().content;

// convert the CSV string to a string array of VM names
var vmNamesList = csvList.split(",");

// now loop over SRM Managed VM names 
for each(var vmName in vmNamesList)
{
	var mySRMVM = findVMByName(vmName);
	if(mySRMVM != null)
	{
		// Found the VM object.....
		// Put your SRM checks etc here
	}
	else
	{
		// Just in case one is missing
		System.log("WARNING!! - SRM Protected VM " + vmName + " could not be found in inventory!!");
	}
}


function findVMByName(myVMName)
{
	var foundVMs = VcPlugin.getAllVirtualMachines(null, "xpath:@name[starts-with(.,'" + myVMName + "')]");
	if(foundVMs != null) // should only be one but the quert returns an array
	{
		return foundVMs[0];
	}
	return null;
}

-HTH