Implementing Cross-Region Replication with Harbor in VMware Cloud Foundation

Why Cross-Region Replication Matters for VCF Deployments Understanding Harbor’s Replication Architecture Implementation Guide: Setting Up Cross-Region Replication Prerequisites Step 1: Establish the Replication Endpoint Step 2: Create a Replication Rule Step 3: Test and Validate Replication Step 4: Configure VKS Clusters to Use Local Harbor Best Practices for Harbor Replication Advanced Scenarios Measuring Success Conclusion Discover more from VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Blog Related Articles Securing Your Software Supply Chain with Harbor Using Harbor as a Proxy Cache for Cloud-Based Registries Making Harbor Production-Ready: Essential Considerations for Deployment In today’s cloud-native landscape, container images are the foundation of modern applications. But what happens when your primary data center goes offline? How do you ensure your containerized workloads remain accessible and deployable across geographically distributed VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) instances? Enter Harbor’s Cross-Region Replication — a powerful capability that every VCF administrator running vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) or containerized workloads should have in their operational toolkit. VMware Cloud Foundation delivers a private cloud platform that many organizations deploy across multiple regions for business continuity, compliance, and performance reasons. When you’re running containerized applications on vSphere Kubernetes Service (VKS) in VCF, Harbor serves as your private container registry, your single source of truth for container images, Helm charts, and OCI artifacts. Consider these real-world VCF scenarios where Cross-Region Replication becomes essential: Multi-Site Active-Active Deployments: You’re running VCF workload domains (or instances) in both US-East and US-West regions to serve customers with low latency. Development teams push container images to the primary Harbor instance, but Kubernetes clusters in both regions need fast, local access to those images. Disaster Recovery Strategy: Your DR plan requires a secondary VCF instance in a different region. When disaster strikes, your VKS clusters need immediate access to the exact same container images to restore services, waiting to transfer multi-gigabyte images over the WAN isn’t an option. Compliance and Data Sovereignty: Regulatory requirements mandate that specific workloads run in designated geographic regions. Cross-region replication ensures each VCF instance maintains a complete, compliant copy of approved container images. Edge Computing with VCF: You’re deploying VCF to edge locations with intermittent connectivity. Pre-replicating container images ensures local availability even when the connection to the central data center is disrupted.