VMware vSphere 6 Metro Storage Cluster Recommended Practices

VMware vSphere® Metro Storage Cluster (vMSC) is a specific configuration within the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). These configurations are commonly referred to as stretched storage clusters or metro storage clusters and are implemented in environments where disaster and downtime avoidance is a key requirement.   This best practices document was developed to provide additional insight and information for operation of a vMSC infrastructure in conjunction with VMware vSphere. This paper explains how vSphere handles specific failure scenarios, and it discusses various design considerations and operational procedures. For detailed information about storage implementations, refer to documentation provided by the appropriate…
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VMware vSphere Replication 6.0

VMware vSphere® Replication™ is a virtual machine data protection and disaster recovery solution. It is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server™ and VMware vSphere Web Client, providing host-based, asynchronous replication of virtual machines. vSphere Replication is a proprietary replication engine developed by VMware that is included with VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit and higher editions of VMware vSphere, VMware vSphere with Operations Management™ editions, and VMware vCloud® Suite editions. vSphere Replication use cases • Data protection and disaster recovery within the same site and across sites • Data center migration • Replication engine for VMware vCloud Air™ Disaster Recovery •…
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vSphere Replication Calculator

Storage and network bandwidth requirements can increase when using vSphere Replication. Besides the network transfers of replicated data from the primary site to the vSphere Replication server, and the transfers from the vSphere Replication server to the ESXi host, the host writes the data to storage once and then, due to the use of redo log snapshots, reads the data back and rewrites it to storage. The amount of network bandwidth that vSphere Replication requires to replicate virtual machines efficiently depends on several factors in your environment. Network-Based storage Size of dataset Data change rate Recovery Point Objective (RPO) Link…
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