Prerequisites for recovering VMware virtual machines using Resiliency Platform Data Mover in Hypervisor mode
The following prerequisites are applicable if you are recovering VMware virtual machines to an on-premises data center using the Hypervisor mode (VAIO) of Resiliency Platform Data Mover.
The Resiliency Platform Data Mover virtual appliances must be part of the same ESXi clusters that host the protected virtual machines in the source and target data centers.
Ensure that all the ESXi servers of the cluster belong to the same VMware data center.
Check the acceptance level on every host system in source and target data center. Ensure that the host system's acceptance level is not set to VMwareCertified. The allowed acceptance levels are VMwareAccepted, PartnerSupported, or CommunitySupported.
By default, the ESX host is set to PartnerSupported.
The virtual machine which is being protected by the Resiliency Platform for the disaster recovery should be of the hardware version supported by both side ESX.
VMware tools are installed on virtual machines.
Virtual machines must not have any physical RDM disks. This is due to a VMware limitation.
If a virtual machine has more than one ethernet adapter, then all of them should have either static IP configuration or DHCP IP configuration. A mix of static and DHCP IP configuration is not supported on the same virtual machine.
On Linux virtual machines, ensure that all the virtual NICs attached to the selected virtual machines have a valid IP address. The IP address may be assigned statically or via DHCP protocol.
All the virtual disks must be connected to the virtual SCSI controllers. Other controller types are not supported.
Ensure that the configuration files (vmx files), residing on the datastores, are not located inside a folder. Also the configuration files must not have any special characters in their names.
Ensure that the VMware hardware version of the protected virtual machines is compatible with the ESXi server versions on both the data centers. For more information refer to VMware KB article.
Enough storage must be available on the recovery data center for provisioning the replicated virtual machines.
Both the source and recovery (target) gateways must have external storage equivalent to 6GB for each virtual machine protected by the gateway pair. For example, if you want to configure and protect 10 virtual machines using a gateway pair, make sure that the source and recovery gateways must each have 60GB of external storage.
With the VMware hardware version 14 Replication Gateway virtual appliance lets you attach 128 disks to a virtual machine of which two are required for internal functioning of Replication Gateway. Hence a maximum of 126 disks can be attached to the Replication Gateway.
Ensure that there are no snapshots for the virtual machines. Attaching a storage policy with vtstap capability to a virtual machine whose snapshot is taken, is not supported by VMware.
The VMware vCenter Server user account used to add the server to Resiliency Platform must have the appropriate privileges for Data Mover.
Each host system in source and target data center must run ESXi version 6.5 or later versions.
If you are protecting virtual machines residing on vSAN datastores, then you need ESXi version 6.5 or later.
Set the
sfcbdservice memory on ESXi as suggested in the following article VMware KB articleEnsure that any file or device is not mounted on the virtual CD drive of the virtual machine.
Ensure that same version of Veritas Replication VIB is installed on all the clusters managed by one vCenter server.
To replicate the virtual machine data, a storage policy which includes vtstap capability in the Common Rules section is required. For details on how to add a capability to storage policy, refer to VMware documentation on Storage Policy Based Management.
Ensure that the storage providers for the vCenter server are in online state.
It is recommended not to use a single-node ESXi cluster in a production environment, since all the virtual machines running on the host need to be powered off in case of an upgrade or uninstallation of Veritas Replication VIB (vSphere Installation Bundle). In a multiple-node ESXi cluster, ensure to enable the automatic mode for DRS. In case of an upgrade or uninstallation of the Veritas Replication VIB, this ensures evacuation of the host by migrating the virtual machines to other hosts in the cluster.