Why do I need vSphere Replication?

Over the summer I was pulled into a kick off meeting for a small migration project and tasked with finding a solution to migrate around 150 VM’s from another companies datacenter to ours. The conversation went something like this… “Hey Greg we need you to come up with a solution to move these VM’s, by the way it all has to be done over a weekend… and we don’t want to spend any money… O.K. Byeeeee!”  Obviously there was a little more to the story… but you get the point. We needed something quick and free.  After thinking it over vSphere replication seemed like a good choice. 

Pros:

• No cost
  • Included with vSphere Essentials License and higher
• Supports up to 2000 VMs
  • Can be increased with additional appliances
• Easy to Install
  • Simple OVA deployment and point to vCenter
• Easy to Use
  • Integrated with vCenter under “Site Recovery”

Cons:

• No automation support
  • Unfortunately the recovery is a manual process… If you want automation you’ll need SRM 
• Limited status tracking
  • There is enough info to make a educated guess to how long the sync will take… but mileage may vary.

Overall it definitely got the job done and all parties involved were happy with the outcome. If this was a larger project I would’ve definitely pushed for SRM or a similar product that would have allowed for automation. At the end of the day, I couldn’t have asked for better results from a product included with our license at no additional cost.

If you want to find out more about vSphere Replication check out the VMware documentation here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/vSphere-Replication/index.html