Managing vSphere Replication with PowerCLI: A First Glance

VMware’s PowerCLI has long been a powerful tool for managing vSphere environments, and with the recent release of version 13.1, it now includes support for managing vSphere Replication (VR). This feature has been highly requested by users, as it allows them to manage their VR environments from within PowerCLI, rather than having to use the vSphere Web Client or the API directly. In this blog post, we’ll take a first glance at the new PowerCLI wrapper for VR and explore some of the basic commands and functionality that are now available.

Getting Started with Connect-VrServer

To begin, we need to connect to our vReplication server using the Connect-VrServer cmdlet. This is similar to connecting to a vCenter server using Connect-VIServer, but there are a few additional ID values that we need to collect. In our example environment, we have one vCenter and one vReplication server, so we only need to collect two ID values:

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Connect-VrServer -vServer “vsphere-replication-server” -Credential (Get-Credential)

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Once we’re connected, we can start using the cmdlets in anger. Let’s take a look at some of the basic commands and functionality that are now available for managing VR environments:

Retrieving Replication Data

One of the first things we might want to do is retrieve some data on the replications in our environment. We can use the Get-VrReplication cmdlet to do this:

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Get-VrReplication -vServer “vsphere-replication-server”

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This will return a list of all the replications that are currently configured in our environment, along with some basic information about each one (such as the source and destination VMs, the replication frequency, and so on).

Configuring Replications

Now that we have our environment connected and we’ve retrieved some data on our replications, we can start configuring our VR environments. One of the most common tasks here is to create new replications or modify existing ones. We can use the New-VrReplication cmdlet to create a new replication, and the Set-VrReplication cmdlet to modify an existing one:

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New-VrReplication -vServer “vsphere-replication-server” -SourceVM “VM1” -DestinationVM “VM2” -Frequency “Hourly”

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Monitoring Replications

Finally, we can use the Get-VrReplication cmdlet to monitor our replications and make sure they’re running correctly. We can retrieve data on the status of each replication, as well as any errors or warnings that might have occurred during the last replication cycle:

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Get-VrReplication -vServer “vsphere-replication-server” -ReplicationId “1234567890”

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This will return detailed information about the specified replication, including its status, any errors or warnings that occurred during the last cycle, and so on.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we’ve taken a first glance at the new PowerCLI wrapper for vSphere Replication (VR). We’ve explored some of the basic commands and functionality that are now available for managing VR environments from within PowerCLI. From connecting to our vReplication server, retrieving replication data, configuring replications, and monitoring replications, we can now perform a wide range of tasks using these new cmdlets. Of course, there’s much more that can be done here, and further examples can be found in the API documentation on developer.vmware.com. PowerCLI snippets are included at the end of the pages for your convenience. We hope you find this new functionality helpful in managing your VR environments!