Just a short post about a feature I recently learned.
In vSphere Replication when you are configuring replication of powered-off VM you will get the following message:
The virtual machine is not powered on. Replication will start when the virtual machine is powered on.
The replication is actually configured and its placeholder VM is created in the recovery location (cloud) but the VM will stay in Not Active state.
Why is this? Immediate start of replication locks VM disks which means such VM would not be able to power-on until the initial sync is finished. But what if you want to replicate powered-off VMs for example templates that are never meant to run?
You can in fact force start the replication by right clicking the VM and selecting Sync Now, which asks confirmation question if we really want to do so as the VM will not be able the be powered on until the operation completes.
Is there a use case for this? As I mentioned this could be used for catalog sync as replication is much faster and efficient that OVF export / import.
Tom Fojta's Blog 