mmarinov,
Thanks SO much for this procedure. It is exactly what I was looking for to allow us to test. One question: Would it be possible to alter this procedure as follows to allow the source VM to stay up and running while testing the recovered VM?:
- "Pause" or "Stop" replication from VSphere replication Web Client. Leave the source VM up and running
- Do manual recovery through the vSphere Web Client.
- If you replicated between datacenters within the same VC you need to recover your VM in folder where it could be added in the inventory of the VC - there is a VC limitation that VMs with the same can't exist in the same virtual machine folder
- when the VM i recovered on the recovery site it will have its network disconnected (with SRM you have this out of the box with the network mappings) and you need to edit the recovered VM to fix this
- power on the recovered VM on a test network, not the production network so as not to conflict with the still running source vm
Keep in mind that at this time there is no replication between the source and destination VM. In order to resume the things you need to:
- remove the recovered VM from the inventory (not delete it from the disk). Leave only the vmdk files and delete the rest files
- unconfigure the source VM replication and start the wizard for configure it again
- during this wizard point as destination folder the Vm of the recovered folder (the one that you left only the vmdk).
- now vSphere Replication will use the destination disks as inital copies and will continue the replication. Keep in mind that if the disks are large there will be delay before the start of sending deltas as VR needs to do some additional calculations between the source and destination disks
