vSphere Replication
Operations Run Slowly as the Number of Replications Increases
Last Updated March 14, 2025

As you increase the number of virtual machines that you replicate,
vSphere Replication
operations can run more slowly.
Response times for
vSphere Replication
operations can increase as you replicate more virtual machines. You possibly experience recovery operation timeouts or failures for a few virtual machines, and RPO violations.
Every virtual machine in a datastore generates regular read and write operations. Configuring
vSphere Replication
on those virtual machines adds another read operation to the regular read and write operations, which increases the I/O load on the storage. The performance of
vSphere Replication
depends on the I/O load of the virtual machines that you replicate and on the capabilities of the storage hardware. If the load generated by the virtual machines, combined with the extra I/O operations that
vSphere Replication
introduces, exceeds the capabilities of your storage hardware, you might experience slow response times.
When running
vSphere Replication
, if response times are greater than 30 ms, reduce the number of virtual machines that you replicate to the datastore. Alternatively, increase the capabilities of your hardware. If you suspect that the I/O load on the storage is an issue and you are using VMware
vSAN
storage, monitor the I/O latency by using the monitoring tool in the
vSAN
interface.