In last post of this series, we deployed VRA’s on each Esxi host and paired the protected and recovery site. In this post we will learn about Zerto Virtual Protection Group (VPG).

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

3: Installing Zerto Virtual Replication Appliance

What is Zerto Virtual Protection Group?

Virtual Protection Group enables virtual machines to be grouped together in same consistency group. Meaning, you can group together those virtual machines which you want to recover together in case of disaster or during test failover. 

For example if you have a 3-tier VM which comprises of a DB server, An application server and a web server, then you might need to recover all 3 of them at the same time at the protected site. … Read More

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.

2: Select the host on which you want to deploy VRA.… Read More

In last post of this series, we discussed about architecture and components of Zerto and we talked about few roles and responsibilities that zerto virtual manager (ZVM) is accountable for. In this post we will learn how to deploy and do basic configuration of ZVM.

Before we move ahead, lets quickly recap what exactly ZVM is responsible for. The main function of ZVM are:

• It  manages everything required for replication between the protected and recovery site. The actual replication of data is done by VRA though.
• It interacts with vCenter Server or SCVMM to get the inventory of VM’s, disk size, network settings and host details etc.
• It monitors changes in VMware environment and responds to that changes, for example, when a protected VM is migrated from one host to another, ZVM intercepts this change and updates this info in the ZVM portal.

Lab Design

Below diagram (not a great one) shows high level overview of components used in my lab.… Read More

I am not new to Disaster Recovery solutions as we use vSphere Replication extensively in our environment for DR purpose. There were few features in vSphere Replication that used to annoy me at times and when I heard about awesomeness of Zerto from few friends, I decided to give it a go in my lab.

In this post we will look into what zerto is and will discuss about its architecture and components. Let’s get started.

What is Zerto?

Zerto is an Israel based company and was founded by Ziv and Oded Kedem. Zerto is specialized in providing enterprise class BC/DR solution for virtual datacenters and cloud based infrastructure. 

Zerto is Hypervisor agnostic and currently supports only VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. Zerto also supports cloud platforms such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and vCloud Air/vCloud Director etc. Using Zerto its very easy to host your DR workloads into cloud solution of your choice. … Read More