One of my blogs tradition is about demystifying vSphere Replication's operational limits;
I've started it in 2013 with vSphere Replication (vR) 5.0 and keep updating it every time a major enhancement was made, like on vR 5.5 and vR 6.0.
If you are new over here, vSphere Replication is a replication engine feature provided by VMware that allows data replication from one storage to another, since it does not depend on array based replication technology, you can use it to replicate data between storages from different vendors. It's also the main component behind VMware Site Recovery, where customers protect their on-prem workloads to VMware Cloud on AWS solution.
Now back to the operational limits;
Starting with version 8.4 the maximum protected VMs a single appliance can handle has been increased from 200 to 300.
That means, using the solution at it’s maximum, you can reach a total of 3000 protected VM.
As stated in KB2102463, to protect more than 500 VMs you need to adjust
/opt/vmware/hms/conf/hms-configuration.xml file and set the parameter as bellow:
<hms-eventlog-maxage>10800</hms-eventlog-maxage>
There's also a few requirements to the environment protecting 3000 VMs; like isolate replication traffic, check the KB2107869 for a comprehensive list.
It worth to mention some others enhancements since I last post about vSphere Replication:
- 5min RPO is now supported on VMFS Datastores, NFS, VVOLS along with vSAN; check the KB2102453 for supported version;
- Minimize security risks by enabling network encryption: You can enable encryption of replication data transfer in VMware vSphere Replication;
- Seamless disk re-sizing. You can increase the virtual disks of virtual machines that are configured for replication, without interruption of ongoing replication;
- Reprotect optimization when vSphere Replication is used with Site Recovery Manager. Checksum is no longer used for reprotect run soon after a planned migration. Instead, changes are tracked at the site of the recovered VM and only those changes are replicated when reprotect is run, speeding up a lot the reprotect process.
Good replication !!!
