Manage replication tasks

You can manage replication tasks from your cloud or the Selectel cloud. This instruction covers managing tasks from the Selectel cloud.

Create a replication task

For more information on setting up replication, refer to the Create a Protection section of the VMware documentation.

From the control panel, open the Cloud Director panel: in the top menu, click Products → VMware-based cloud → the Cloud Director section.
In the Menu, select Availability.
Go to the Incoming Replications.
Click ( **New protection **).
On the Cloud vApps and VMs step, in the Source site field, select the main site from which the virtual machines will be replicated.
Select the virtual machines you want to replicate. They must be powered on—as long as a virtual machine is powered off, its replication will not start.
Click Next.
On the Destination VDC and Storage policy step, select a virtual data center in the Selectel cloud to which replication will occur.
Select a storage policy that corresponds to your virtual data center.
Click Next.
On the Settings step, specify the RPO value; for more details, see the Recovery Point Objective section of the VMware documentation. When choosing a value, consider infrastructure requirements: if you have a slow internet connection or the main virtual machine has a large volume of changing data, the RPO value should be increased.
Turn on the Enable retention policy toggle and configure the policy for creating and storing virtual machine copies:
- Instances — the number of replication instances that will be stored at one time;
- Distance — the frequency of creation of copies in units from the Unit;
- Unit — the unit of time measurement (hours, days, months, etc.).
Optional: to set the time for the first synchronization, in the Delay start synchronization block, turn on the toggle and specify the date and time of the first synchronization of virtual machines at the main and backup sites.
Optional: to exclude individual disks from replication and save disk space at the backup site, turn on the toggle in the Exclude disks block.
Optional: if there is already a copy of the virtual machine being replicated in the Selectel cloud and you want to synchronize it with the virtual machine at the main site, turn on the toggle in the Configure Seed VM block and specify the target machine.
Click Next.
If you turned on the toggle in the Configure Seed VM block, on the Seed VM step, select the virtual machine copies for synchronization.
If you turned on the toggle in the Exclude disks block, on the Replicated Disks step, select the disks that need to be replicated.
On the Ready to complete step, check the settings and click Finish. Creating a replication task will take some time.

Create a reverse replication task

After a failover, you can configure reverse replication—from the backup site (Selectel cloud) to your main site. For this, the replication task that was used for the failover must be in the Failed-Over.

Virtual machines will remain accessible during reverse replication.

For more information on reverse replication tasks, refer to the Perform a Reverse Task section of the VMware documentation.

From the control panel, open the Cloud Director panel: in the top menu, click Products → VMware-based cloud → the Cloud Director.
In the Menu, select Availability.
Go to the Incoming Replications.
Select the task for the virtual machine that was replicated.
In the All actions menu, select Reverse.
Click Reverse.
In the new task, the Cloud vApps and VMs tab will automatically have the main site and virtual data centers selected.
Configure the remaining settings as you would when creating a replication task.

Delete a replication task

From the control panel, open the Cloud Director panel: in the top menu, click Products → VMware-based cloud → the Cloud Director.
In the Menu, select Availability.
Go to the Incoming Replications.
Select the task for the virtual machine that was replicated.
In the All actions menu, select Delete replication.
Click Delete.