Replication - Full

[lwarner]

After upgrading from v11 to v12, I noticed that some of my replication jobs will do a 'Full' replication at seemingly random times. I have never seen this behavior before. Some of the jobs are huge, so of course this is a concern with the backup window. Source for these jobs is Production.

Is this normal, and what are the criteria that trigger the Full replication?
Shouldn't Replication jobs do a initial Full replica, and then just replicate changes after that (forever)?

Not sure if it's related, but after the v12 update, some of my backup jobs also ended up with the Active full backup box checked, when they originally had the Synthetic box checked.

Wondering if I'm missing something here.

[mickey.friedman]

Hi,

Regarding replication, there are cases that a full replication will occur, for example if you changed (added/extended/shrunk) a drive in the original VM, changed a VM name, etc... another case would be a problem at the target site, I don't think upgrading to V12 has something to do with it.

However, what you are claiming about the backup jobs changes is interesting, should not happen. Are you sure at what you see ?

[lwarner]

Yes, I am aware of that. Looking more closely, this job is running Full every single time. I just created a test Replication job, same parameters, and it does Full on the first run and Incremental on subsequent runs. The settings are identical. I'm wondering if there is something in the infrastructure, perhaps a vCenter setting, that is causing this.

Regarding backup jobs changing, yes 100%. I document everything.

[lwarner]

Well to answer my own question, in case anyone ever runs into this...

I ended up opening a support ticket, 06164213. The "Full every time" behavior was not correct, but the cause was unknown, one of those "it just happens sometimes" things.
The resolution is rather simple:
- Remove the Replica VMs from configuration
- Make a new Replication job with the same settings, and map to the existing VMs.

The new job will take a bit of time to calculate digests, but it doesn't transfer data during this time so there's not much impact. And now it runs as expected - Full the first time, and Incremental on subsequent runs.