Apologies as some of this is covered in other topics but I am looking for some guidance and confirmation. We have a very basic setup, 2 ESXi hosts at our main site managed by an instance of vCenter. Both hosts just use local storage with a few VMs on each under light load (2 DCs, file server, line of business app server). We have a second site connected by a dedicated fiber run with a single ESXi host with local storage and enough resources to run the VMs from the two production hosts. To speed up DR we wanted to also replicate and have stand-by VMs rather then the have to restore from backup. Currently we have Essentials and were planning on purchasing essentials plus.
Will essentials plus allow us to setup a DR site with a 2nd vCenter instance and replication appliance/servers or would we need a license for the production site and another for the DR site? If not, would doing replication in a single vCenter Server scenario work? That seems more prone to fault as if the replication appliance/servers and vCenter is running at the main site they may not be reachable during DR unless we move them to the DR site.
Thanks,