Getting Started With Zerto-Part 3: Deploying Zerto Virtual Replication Appliance

Manish Jha

In last post of this series we deployed ZVM. In this post we will deploy the VRA appliance and will see how to pair protected and recovery sites.

If you have landed directly on this page by mistake, then I encourage you to read earlier posts of this series from below links:

1: Zerto Architecture and Components

2: Installing Zerto Virtual Manager

VRA is a debian based VM and it is the replication engine that manages the changed blocks for replication and the compression of the data. VRA mirrors protected VMs I/O operations to the recovery site. The OVF template for VRA is embedded into ZVM and VRA’s can only be deployed from within ZVM interface.

Lets dive into lab now and deploy few VRA’s.

1: Login to ZVM portal and navigate to SETUP tab and click on NEW VRA.

ZVR-1

2: Select the host on which you want to deploy VRA. Remeber we have to deploy one applince on eac and every esxi host.

  • Provide the Esxi host root password and select the datastore on which VRA will be deployed.
  • Chose the network to which VRA will be connected. Typically this is the network to which your ZVM,vCenter and Esxi hosts etc are connected.
  • If you have resource crunch in your lab, you can reduce the memory allocation of VRA, else leave it to defult 3 GB. 
  • I have not created any VRA group yet as I want to explore this later in my lab.
  • Provide the IP address/Netmask and Default GW for VRA and clcik on Install.

ZVR-2

3: Onve you have initiated VRA deployment for all host, you can monitor their progress. Also if there are any issues with any of the VRA deployment, you will see the errors here.

ZVR-3

4: Now if you want to know whats happening in backend when VRA deployment is going on, connect to vCenter server and watch for the tasks and events. 

ZVR-4

5: Typically after 3-4 minutes, you will see the appliances getting deployed successfully and their status as green.

ZVR-5

6: Click on any one of the VRA to see the details about that specific VRA. 

ZVR-6

Pairing Protected and Recovery Sites

The ZVMs are connected or paired with each other across sites and the VRA’s are then paired via the ZVM, but once replication is configured the 2 VRAs are in constant sync. 

To pair the protected site ZVM with recovery site ZVM, navigate to SITES tab and click on PAIR.

ZVR-7.PNG

2: Provide the details of ZVM of the recovery site and clcik on PAIR button.

ZVR-8

3: And thats it. Now both Protected and Recovery sites are paired.

ZVR-9

Thats it for this post. In next post of this series, we will learn how to create protection group.

I hope you find this post informational. Feel free to share this on social media if it is worth sharing. Be sociable 🙂

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