I have been looking into vSphere Replication recently and I have been thinking of using it in a one site environment, meaning I only have 1 vCenter with just 2 hosts but I want to utilize vSphere Replication as part of my backup plan. I found lots of material online on setting it up for multiple sites (i.e. more than one vCenter site), but nothing on one-site replication.
I tried to do it myself in my test lab but it didn't work well, for example I couldn't see the replica VM on the target host even though it was present in the target datastore, the Recover option wasn't showing up (so I couldn't actually test recovery), and even when I outright deleted the original VM for testing I couldn't recover it back.