Deploying an Additional vSphere Replication Server

Depending on a customer’s requirement, there may be a need to deploy additional vSphere Replication servers. A few use cases are for availability and load balancing. Another one I can think of is if you want to deploy a vSphere Replication Server on a remote site that is managed by a vCenter Server on the main site. With vSphere Replication 5.5, you can add up to 9 VRS for a total of 10 including the first VR appliance which holds both the VRMS and VRS functionality. For a complete detail on vSphere Replication/SRM limits, see KB Article 2034768

In this article, I’ll show how easy it is to deploy an additional vSphere Replication Appliance.

1. In the web client, go to Manage–> vSphere Replication–> Replication Servers. Click on the OVF deployment icon to deploy the VRS ovf.

2. The file to select is vSphere_Replication_Addon_OVF10.ovf. This OVF is only 512MB in RAM, all other resources (CPU, disk) is the same as the vSphere Replication appliance OVF.

3. Review the OVF details and click Next.

4. Select the name of the VRS and folder to place it to, then click Next

5. Select the cluster as a resource to run the VRS. Click Next

6. Select the datastore where the VRS will be located. If needed, you can also change the virtual disk format. Click Next

7. Select the portgroup that will be used by the VRS. Under IP Allocation I selected Static-Manual and configured the DNS, Netmask, and Gateway settings. Click Next

8. Provide a password for the VRS root account as well as the IP address of the VRS. Click Next

9. Click Finish to start the OVF deployment.

Once the VRS is powered on and initialized, we now have to register this new VRS as an additional VRS. To do so, perform the following:

1. In the web client, go to Manage–> vSphere Replication–> Replication Servers. Click the middle icon (Register a virtual machine as vSphere Replication Server) and select the newly deployed VRS.