vSphere Replication explained

vSphere Replication is a hypervisor-level replication engine that offers protection and recoverability to the vast majority of vSphere environments. It allows you to protect the VMs in your vSphere environment by copying their disk files to another location where they can be recovered.

vSphere Replication employs a software-based replication engine that works at the host level, rather than the array level. Identical hardware is not required at both sites and the storage systems or protocols at sites can be different; VMs can be replicated between different types of storage (for example, between VMFS and NFS or from iSCSI to local disk).

vSphere Replication Applicance comes bundled into a single OVA format that is deployed on vCenter Server. It is fully integrated with the vSphere 5.x environment and managed through vSphere Web Client.