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 **).
At the Cloud vApps and VMs step in the Source site field, select the primary 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.
At the Destination VDC and Storage policy step, select the virtual data center in the Selectel cloud where the replication will take place.
Select a storage policy that corresponds to your virtual data center.
Click Next.
At the Settings step, specify the RPO value; for more details, see the Recovery Point Objective documentation from VMware. When choosing a value, consider the infrastructure requirements: if you have a slow internet connection or a large amount of changed data on the primary virtual machine, the RPO value should be increased.
Toggle Enable retention policy and configure the policy for creating and storing virtual machine copies:
- Instances — the number of replication instances to be stored simultaneously;
- Distance — the frequency of creating copies in the units from the Unit field;
- Unit — time unit (hours, days, months, etc.).
Optional: to set the time of the first synchronization, in the Delay start synchronization block, turn on the toggle and specify the date and time of the first virtual machine synchronization on the primary and backup sites.
Optional: to exclude individual disks from replication and save disk space on the backup site, turn on the toggle in the Exclude disks block.
Optional: if a copy of the virtual machine being replicated already exists in the Selectel cloud and you want to synchronize it with the virtual machine on the primary 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, select the virtual machine copies for synchronization at the Seed VM step.
If you turned on the toggle in the Exclude disks block, mark the disks that need to be replicated at the Replicated Disks step.
At 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 failover you can configure reverse replication — from the backup site (Selectel cloud) to your primary site. To do this, the replication task used for the failover must be in the Failed-Over status.

Virtual machines will remain accessible during reverse replication.

For more information on reverse replication tasks, see 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 → Cloud Director section.
In the Menu menu, select Availability.
Go to the Incoming Replications section.
Select the task for the virtual machine that was replicated.
In the All actions menu, select Reverse.
Click Reverse.
In the new task on the Cloud vApps and VMs tab, the primary site and virtual data centers will be selected automatically.
Configure the remaining parameters as 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 → Cloud Director section.
In the Menu menu, select Availability.
Go to the Incoming Replications section.
Select the task for the virtual machine that was replicated.
In the All actions menu, select Delete replication.
Click Delete.