Recover virtual machine when vcenter is down too

[timgarbim]

Hello everyone,

I´m new to VMware vSphere replication, and i have a question about replication with only once vCenter. I have :

1 site A with 1 ESXi 5.1 with vSphere replication 5.1 (web console and 1 appliance)

1 site B  with 1 ESXi 5.1 to hold the replication.

Ok, the replication is fine between these sites, but if i LOST my vCenter, is there a way to recover it in site B, since i need vCenter to click "Recover".

Or should i put the vCenter and the appliance in my Site B (not production) and replicate Site A Virtual machines to Site B?

thank you for any information.

[Biliana]

Hi,

The vCenter Server for the site from which you are initiating recovery operation must be available. The primary use case for using vSphere Replication in a setup with single vCenter Server is to allow for replicating between different clusters/hosts, managed by a single vCenter Server. In that case if a host experiences unplanned event, you can recover your replicated VMs on another host managed by this vCenter Server.

[mmarinov]

Unfortunately without VR UI you can't recover your replicas in case you are using VR w/o SRM.

In order to make sure that vCenter and VR servers are at good state you need to make them high available, either by VMware solution or by putting on available storage/host or by backing up them.

In the one vCenter scenario normally the source VMs are not located on the same host with the vCenter server. However, in case it is doable at all, I would recommend to have vCenter and VR servers on separate host/datastore that the source VMs or replica files