Monitoring vmware replication

[gommog]

I've recently started using vmware replication and everything seems to be working fine, the only issue i have is that i have no idea what rate replication is taking place at and although i can set the RPO at 15 mins for critical VMs i have no idea what amount of data is being replicated at any one time. The only way i can test this is to copy files to a vm, stop replication and power off the vm then recover the copy. This has worked fine for smaller files but i have no idea how long this would take if i were to copy GBs of data. What i'm looking for is some way to monitor the replica to see if files have been copied across, anyone know of a way to do this?

[Biliana]

Hi,

I think what might be useful for you is to monitor the events on the primary site in the original VM and look for delta completed events, which will also contain the bytes transfered in a RPO window. If the attempt to sync all changed data since the last sync takes more time than your RPO setting is, your replication will turn into RPO violation state (an event will also be posted), so you would normally very easily detect that the replication did not meet its RPO objective.

Hope this helps.

[gommog]

Thanks Biliana, that's a useful tip and one i'll be keeping an eye on, what i'm really interested in though is some way to monitor the rate at which replication is taking place at any given time. For instance when i start an initial full sync i can check the datastore and get a rough idea of how much data is copying across but not any decent stats. Is there anything i can do from the PowerCLI for instance?

[memaad]

Hi,

I dont think any such tools is available for now for monitoring vSphere Replication rate , atleast from VMware. I am not sure about any non-VMware tools.

Regards

Mohammed

[gommog]

Thanks Mohammed, i will live in hope for now as i'm sure they're coming in a future release.

[mvalkanov]

Hi,

In a next release, progress information (% and bytes)  might be added in the VR UI, however, such data in current releases is  only available in SRM UI (and currently only % value, not bytes).

You could try the vim-cmd commands listed at this article - http://virtuallyhyper.com/2012/08/vsphere-replication-shows-inactive-replication/. However, these are not officially supported.