Replication within the Same Vcenter instance.

[vm-au-user]

We currenly have two vcenter instance in two seperate datacentes which have stretch network across the two datacentres. We need to move to a new datacentre and to facilitate the migration we are planning on using SRM.

The new datacentre is up and running and network has been extended to this 3rd site also. In Vcenter I've setup a new cluster and add the relocated hosts into this cluster.

I now have 1 Vcenter instance with 1 cluster at site A  (not changing) and 1 Vcenter instance with 2 cluster clusters, 1 for site B (old) and 1 for Site C (new)

My quetsion is, can I use Vsphere Replication to migrate between cluster B and C in the same VCenter instance or does SRM only work between Vcenter instance?

Thanks in Advance

[mvalkanov]

Hi,

Currently SRM can not work within a single vCenter Server instance topology.

However, vSphere Replication 5.1 (requires vCenter Server 5.1) can. You can use the VR UI plugin, accessible through the vSphere Web Client to configure replications for the virtual machines and perform recovery at the new hosts. In the VR UI there is no orchestration or IP-customization support, like in SRM, but you should be able to configure replication and later perform the migration via the recovery wizard with minimal downtime. Currently the VR recovery wizard is for a single VM, so you will need to go through it for each VM. The actual recovery tasks can execute in parallel.

Regards,

Martin