Hello,
I am trying to figure out which method of resizing/expanding VMDK files is the official VMware-supported method (as of vCenter 5.5U1, ESXi 5.5U1, vSphere Replication 5.5.1, and SRM 5.5.1). In particular I am looking for the use case where the original replication session was NOT set up using seeds. There are basically three VMware-published approaches:
1) According to the "VMware vSphere Replication Administration" guide, page 62, under "Resize Virtual Machine Disk Files During Replication Without Using Replication Seeds", the procedure is to perform a VM recovery, stop replication, resize the source disk, resize the "recovered" disk at destination, unregister the recovered VM, re-configure replication using the recovered disk as the new seed. I have used this approach in a "pure" vSphere Replication implementation (no SRM) and it works great, and it's not terribly complex.
2) However, the SRM documentation has a different procedure. The "Site Recovery Manager Administration" document, page 86, under "Resize Virtual Machine Disk Files During Replication Without Using Replication Seeds", the procedure is to run a test recovery of the VM, clone the VM to the same datastore, revert/cleanup the test, stop replication, resize the source disk, resize the "cloned" disk at destination, unregister the cloned VM, re-configure replication using the cloned disk as the new seed. This procedure won't work if you don't have 2x the amount of disk space needed at the destination. So if I need to expand a 1.5 TB disk to 1.6 TB, I need at least 1.5 TB of free space at the DR Site in order to clone the recovered VM momentarily. I also have to wait for the clone operation to complete, as opposed to the above procedure which is much faster.
3) Finally, there is a VMware KB article that describes yet a third approach, which is basically the above approach, plus the added complexity of using the CLI to rename disk files, modifying the VMDK descriptor files, replacing the dbb.uuid values:
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2042790
My question to the SRM + vSphere Replication community is: which is the above approaches is the "correct" approach for resizing virtual disks when using vSphere Replication 5.5.1 with SRM 5.5.1 (without having used seeds for initial replication)?
Thanks,
Bill