There are many situations when you might need to abort an ongoing disaster recovery replication job on your Nutanix cluster. You may be deleting the protection domain or maybe you added a large VM to an existing protection domain and now you don’t want to include this new VM’s baseline replication in the existing job, at least not before the weekend. Maybe the destination is running short of space and we need to stop adding to the problem. 

You can see the replication in Prism, but there’s no button to pause or cancel it.

To abort the replication we will need to go to the CLI. This process is covered in https://portal.nutanix.com/kb/3272

SSH to a CVM in the cluster as the user ‘nutanix’, then run ‘ncli’ to get into this interactive CLI.

First, list current ongoing replications with this command. You’ll need the Protection Domain name and ID from this output for the next command. 

<ncli> pd ls-repl-status

You’ll need the Protection Domain name and ID from this output for the next command.

Next, run the “pd abort-replication” command:

<ncli> pd abort-repl name=pd_name replication-ids=<ID>

As the variable name suggests, you can provide multiple inputs for “replication-ids” in the form of a comma separated list, i.e. 2981747,2747495

Keep in mind, the abort command will cancel the current replication and discard any blocks which were transferred. If you want to keep the progress but put replication on hold until further notice, use the “pause-replication” command instead, and then use the “resume-replication” command later to start it back up.

For more information on data protection in your Nutanix cluster, see Data Protection and Recovery with Prism Element or check out the Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Best Practices Guide.