With the release of vSphere 6.5 and support for VVol replication there was also a need to be able to manage and automate certain replication related tasks. Out of the box there is no integration with VMware’s automation products such as SRM and vRealize Orchestrator and Automation. So to be able to actually use the VVol replication capabilities in vSphere 6.5 VMware had to develop new cmdlets for it. There are only a few scenarios associated with VVol replication that you can perform actions on. That includes doing either a planned or unplanned failover, a test failover, reversing replication and forcing a sync replication.
VMware posted PowerCLI 6.5R1 yesterday and below are the cmdlets related to VVol replication along with a brief description on what they do. Customers will have to create their own scripts for now until VMware adds support for VVol replication tasks into their automation products. Also note right now there is no cmdlet for doing a test failover which essentially clones the replicated VVols at the target site and exposes them to vSphere for testing. So if you want to do that (who wouldn’t) you’ll have to use one of their other programming interfaces such as Java.
- Get-SpbmFaultDomain – This cmdlet retrieves fault domains based on name or ID filter. The fault domain ID is globally unique.
- Get-SpbmReplicationGroup – This cmdlet retrieves replication groups. The replication groups can be of type source or target.
- Get-SpbmReplicationPair – This cmdlet retrieves the relation of replication groups in a pair of source and target replication group.
- Start-SpbmReplicationFailover – This cmdlet performs a failover of the devices in the specified replication groups. This cmdlet should be called at the replication target location. After the operation succeeds, the devices will be ready to be registered by using the virtual machine file path.
- Start-SpbmReplicationPrepareFailover – This cmdlet prepares the specified replication groups to fail over.
- Start-SpbmReplicationReverse – This cmdlet initiates reverse replication, by making the currently failed over replication group the source and its peer replication group the target. The devices in the replication group will start getting replicated to this new target site, which was the source before the failover.
- Sync-SpbmReplicationGroup – This cmdlet synchronizes the data between source and replica for the specified replication group. The replicas of the devices in the replication group are updated and a new point in time replica is created. This function should be called at the replication target location
