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I currently have two VSphere 6 sites. Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is installed and configured (using array-based replication) to fail over to the backup site on a failure.

Before I installed SRM, I was able to use VSphere Replication to replicate a few VMs to different, local storage in my main site. I used it as a simple way of backing up important VMs to cold storage.

Now, after installing SRM, I only see the option to use VSphere Replication to replicate to the backup site. Is there a way around this? Can I go back to my old ways of using VSphere Replication, without having to remove SRM?

zachzins
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1 Answers1

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Unfortunately, you cant.

If you take a look at the documentation, you will not find a phrase saying "You cannot do array-based and vmware-level replication at the same time", but this information is somehow implicit. More information here:

Note

Do not attempt to configure vSphere Replication on a virtual machine that resides on a datastore that you replicate by using array-based replication.

The same way, this document also says that you cant mix replication types in a protection group.

It makes a lot of sense, since array-based replication is higly integrated with storage features(EMC RecoverPoint, NetApp vFiler..) and other more specific like EMC RecoverPoint that will allow you to rollback point in time snapshots while making replication at block level. An operation on SRM could somehow break the vSphere Replication protected vm.

td,dr: You cant replicate vms with vSphere Replication that resides on a array-based datastore protected by SRM.

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    Thank you for the response. As it turns out, I was somewhat misusing VSphere Replication. Until just recently, I wasn't aware that VSphere Data Protection was even a thing. VDP fit the bill much better for what we were trying to do. – zachzins Jan 08 '16 at 21:36