As part of a recent vSphere 5.5 deployment, I installed a small vSphere Replication 5.8 proof-of-concept for the customer to trial site-to-site replication and get their minds around how they can do some simple DR activities. The appliance is fairly simple to deploy, so I thought I’d just provide a few links to articles that I found useful. Firstly, esxi-guy has a very useful soup-to-nuts post on the steps required to deploy a replication environment, and the steps to recover a VM. You can check it out here. Secondly, here’s a link to the official vSphere Replication documentation in PDF and eBook formats – just the sort of thing you’ll want to read while on the treadmill or sitting on the bus on the way home from the salt mines. Finally, if you’re working in an environment that has a number of firewalls in play, this list of ports you need to open is pretty handy.

One problem we did have was that we’d forgotten what the password was on the appliance we’d deployed at each site. I’m not the greatest cracker in any case, and so we agreed that re-deploying the appliance would be the simplest course of action. So I deleted the VM at each site and went through the “Deploy from OVF” thing again. The only thing of note that happened was that it warned me I had previously deployed a vSphere Replication instance with that name and IP address previously, and that I should get rid of the stale version. I did that at each site and then joined them together again and was good to go. I’m now trying to convince the customer that SRM might be of some use to them too. But baby steps, right?

Note also that, if you want to deploy additional vSphere Replication VMs to assist with load-balancing in your environment, you need to use the vSphere_Replication_AddOn_OVF10.ovf file for the additional appliances.