Requirements to the Environment for the Support of Up To 4000 Replications
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Requirements to the Environment for the Support of Up To 4000 Replications

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Article ID: 317500

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Updated On:

Products

VMware Live Recovery VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

vSphere Replication 8.4 has increased scalability to support a maximum of up to 3000 configured replications.
vSphere Replication 8.6 provides support to a maximum of up to 4000 configured replications.

Please read the following information to understand the requirements that the environment must meet to support the configuration and management up to the maximum number of replications.

Please note the supported maximum for older versions of vSphere replication is only 2000

When upgrading a vSphere Replication instance that uses the internal database to version 8.4 or newer, additional configuration is required to enable support for up to 3000 or more replications. See Configuring upgraded vSphere Replication Appliances to support up to 4000 Replications

If planning to replicate more than 500 virtual machines, the default value for the event maximum age must be changed at the vSphere Replication appliance.

In addition, the maximum number of replications that a vSphere Replication Management Server can support depends on a number of factors in the environment, like bandwidth, change rate in the guest operating system of the replicated VMs, replication traffic compression, RPO period, and others.

Supported versions of vSphere and vSphere Replication 8.4 or newer should be deployed at both the source and target sites for best results.

 

Environment

VMware vSphere Replication 8.x
VMware vSphere Replication 6.0.x
VMware vSphere Replication 6.1.x

Resolution

To support up to 3000 or more replicated VMs, the source and the target site must have sufficient server, storage, and network resources to facilitate the transfer of replication data.

The average change rate in source VMs should not exceed 5% per day.

Compute Resources

  • vSphere Replication database: Embedded
  • Total number of virtual machines in the environment: 3000 (or up to 4000 for vSphere replication 8.6 or newer)

Storage

  • Storage protocol used: fiber channel
  • Total capacity of approximately 6TB at each site, source and target.

Network

The network traffic must be isolated on separate NICs as follows.

  • vmnic 0 for replication management
  • vmnic 1 (recommended minimum 1 Gb) for replication traffic
  • vmnic 2 for NFC traffic

See Isolating the Network Traffic of vSphere Replication

Replication Settings

  • Lowest recommended average RPO value: 4 hours
  • Recommended maximum percentage of replicated VMs with multiple recovery points enabled: 10%
  • Network traffic compression: enabled
    NOTE: The CPU resources that a replication uses on the hosts double when traffic compression is enabled.

Lower RPO values, higher data change rates, fewer compute, network, or storage resources, might impact the number of VMs that can be replicated. Use the Calculate Bandwidth For vSphere Replication for initial guidance. Check how a replication impacts the environment by using the vSphere Replication Administration