vSphere Replication Question

[cer113]

HI,

I have question about vSphere Replication. I configured replication but before final recovery I would like to find out when I do manual "Sync Now"

should I shut down the server to prevent any more data from coming or server has to be powered up but all services on have to be stopped.

Last time when I performed this action I was never able to do final sync. Then I was told that when I do Sync Now virtual machine has to be powered on.

On some forums I am finding information that when I do sync now virtual machine can be shut down

What would be the right answer

I tried once Sync Now when virtual machine was powered off and it was going for long time although machine was very small. I was told that sync will never finish since machine is down

[scott28tt]

Moderator note: Moved to the vSphere Replication forum area.

[mvalkanov]

Hi,

Which version of VR are you using?

The VR UI plugin for the Web Client uses the VM power state to decide whether to invoke "online sync" or "offline sync".

It is ok to do graceful guest shutdown of the VM and then invoke "Sync now", which in turn will invoke "offline sync".

For powered off VMs, the offline sync calculates and compares checksum of all disk blocks at the source site and target site and sends any disk block for which the checksum does not match. This operation can be time consuming and VM power on is blocked due to the .vmdks being locked by the offline sync task. If using thin-provisioned disks are used, there are significant performance improvements in VR 6.0 compared to previous VR releases.

If the sync fails for some reason, details should be available at source vCenter as events on the source VM or at source ESXi vmkernel.log when looking for "Hbr". Any issues with access to target datastore will be available as event at target vCenter server and also at VR server logs (/var/log/vmware/hbrsrv*log).

Regards,

Martin

[cer113]

this is the version

[cer113]

So would you consider doing Sync Now when the machine is offline or online

[NoOneOn]

You should firstly shut down guest OS (and power off VM).

Then, when you will recover VM on target site, choose "Synchronize recent changes" and it will automatically sync latest delta. You will have 100% identically copy after that on target host.

Also, there is a good article about Syncronization Types (https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/06/vsphere-replication-synchronization-types.html)