Prerequisites for recovering VMware virtual machines using Resiliency Platform Data Mover in In-guest mode
The following prerequisites are applicable if you are recovering VMware virtual machines to an on-premises data center using the in-guest mode 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 canters.
Ensure that all the ESXi servers of the cluster belong to the same VMware data center. •
The virtual machine which is being protected by the Resiliency Platform for the disaster recovery should be of the hardware version supported by ESX servers on both sides.
VMware tools are installed on virtual machines.
RDM disks in Virtual Dependent mode are supported. 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.
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. See VMware vCenter Server privileges: replication using in-guest mode of Resiliency Platform 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.
Ensure that any file or device is not mounted on the virtual CD drive of the virtual machine.
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.
The virtual machines have to be prepared for replication using the in-guest mode by going through the Prepare Host for Replication process.