Hi all
I'm setting up SRM with vSphere Replication at the moment. I don't want to do the initial replication over the network so I plan to copy all the VMs to a USB drive, take it to the remote site, copy it back, then enable vSphere replication to keep it all up to date. In theory, this approach seems to be fine although I'm struggling with a couple of practicalities...
1. Our vCenter is a VM so I'll have to plug the USB drive into my PC and use datastore browser to copy the VMDK files down. Is there a way I could connect the USB drive directly to one of the ESX hosts and use it to copy the VMDK files to USB rather than doing it over the network?
2. Is there a way to do this with the VM still powered on? I tried to do it by taking a snapshot, then copying out the "parent" VMDK but it throws a "Expect put message. Got: ERROR" so it doesn't like that. I could power the VMs off to do this but it's going to be a bit of a pain. Can anyone recommend a better way?
cheers
Dave