Simplifying Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery with Pivot3 and Zerto D E P L O Y M E N T A N D C O N F I G U R A T I O N G U I D E
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Table of Contents
Overview ...................................................................................................................................................... 2
About Pivot3 ................................................................................................................................................ 2
About Zerto .................................................................................................................................................. 2
Test Components ........................................................................................................................................ 2
Pivot3 N5 PCIe Flash Array .......................................................................................................................... 3
Pivot3 Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) ............................................................................................. 3
Zerto Virtual Replication ............................................................................................................................. 4
Description of Use Case .............................................................................................................................. 4
Recovery Site Pivot3 vSTAC Setup ............................................................................................................. 5
vCenter Setup ............................................................................................................................................................................... 5
vSTAC Manager Plug-in ............................................................................................................................................................... 6
Pivot3 vSTAC Array Creation ...................................................................................................................................................... 7
Logical Volume Creation .......................................................................................................................................................... 11
Zerto Virtual Replication Setup ................................................................................................................ 17
Zerto Virtual Protection Group (VPG) Creation .................................................................................................................... 17
Test VPG Failover ...................................................................................................................................... 22
VM Failover / Failback ............................................................................................................................... 24
Offsite Backup Setup and Create ............................................................................................................. 28
Restore a VPG from a Repository ............................................................................................................. 30
Restore Files from Recovery Site .............................................................................................................. 31
Summary ................................................................................................................................................... 33
© Copyright 2017 Pivot3, Inc.
All rights reserved. Specifications are subject to change without notice. Pivot3, RAIGE, Pivot3 vSTAC, Pivot3 vSTAC OS, Pivot3 vSTAC Enterprise HCI, Pivot3 vSTAC P Cubed, Pivot3 vSTAC R2S, Pivot3 vSTAC Edge, Pivot3 vSTAC Manager, Pivot3 vSTAC Watch, Pivot3 Virtual Security Server (VSS), Pivot3 Enterprise HCI, and High-Definition Storage are trademarks or registered trademarks of Pivot3. All other brands or products are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders and should be treated as such. Pivot3 reserves the right to make changes or corrections to this document as needed without notification.
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Overview Organizations have become deeply dependent on their virtualized IT infrastructure and digital data for everyday operations and business success. At the same time, risks affecting business continuity have increased and IT organizations are continuously challenged with protecting business-critical applications and data against various causes of downtime.
Pivot3 and Zerto combine to deliver simple, powerful and easy to manage infrastructure for business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR). The synergies between the solutions help ensure uninterrupted business results for IT organizations and lower the costs to deploy and manage BCDR initiatives.
The purpose of this document is to demonstrate validation of the interoperability of Zerto Virtual Replication solution (ZVR) with Pivot3 vSTAC Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) as a BCDR infrastructure and Pivot3 N5 PCIe Flash Array as the production storage. The document provides step-by-step instructions to users for setting up and executing disaster recovery scenarios with Zerto Virtual Replication and Pivot3 vSTAC HCI in the recovery site. It is assumed the reader has a basic understanding of Zerto and Pivot3 technologies.
About Pivot3 Pivot3 improves the simplicity and economics of the enterprise datacenter with industry-leading hyperconverged infrastructure technology. By combining storage, compute, and networking on commodity hardware, Pivot3 provides software-defined platforms that let IT run multiple, mixed application workloads on a single infrastructure while guaranteeing performance to the applications that matter most. Pivot3’s agile infrastructure solutions extend performance, scale and efficiency across more of the datacenter so customers can keep pace with the demands of modern business. With over 2,400 customers in 54 countries and 18,000 hyperconverged deployments in multiple industries such as healthcare, government, transportation, security, entertainment, education, gaming and retail, Pivot3 is redefining HCI with smarter infrastructure solutions.
About Zerto Zerto provides enterprise-class disaster recovery and business continuity software specifically for virtualized datacenters and cloud environments. Zerto’s award winning solution provides enterprises with continuous data replication & recovery designed specifically for virtualized infrastructure and the cloud. Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications and built to deal with the virtual paradigm.
Test Components The solution components included in this whitepaper are:
Site 1: Louisville CO Pivot3 N5-1500 PCIe Flash Array Dell PowerEdge R730 XL Server 2 X Nexus Switches model: 5548UP Palo Alto Firewall VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 2 VMware vCenter 6.0 Update 2 Zerto Version 4.5 Update 1
Site 2: Atlanta GA 3 X Pivot3 Hybrid HCI Nodes with vSTAC 7.4 2 X Cisco 9320 Switches Cisco ASA Firewall VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 2 VMware vCenter 6.0 Update 2 Zerto Version 4.5 Update 1
Protected VM’s: • Microsoft WindowsÒ 2012 R2 with Microsoft SQLÒ Server 2014 • Microsoft WindowsÒ 10
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Pivot3 N5 PCIe Flash Array Pivot3’s N5 PCIe Flash Arrays (N5) offer both productivity-boosting performance and simplified management for business workloads. Unlike other arrays that treat all data homogenously, Pivot3’s advanced Quality of Service (QoS) governs performance targets, I/O prioritization, and prioritization of snapshots and replication, allowing you to meet business SLAs with policy-based simplicity. The N5 solution is available in both all-flash and hybrid configurations that deliver the predictable application performance along with industry-leading flash utilization.
The N5 storage array used in this configuration is the N5-1500 (all-flash array) and includes 2.6TB of PCIe flash, 15TB SSD (raw) and is rated for 450,000 IOPS and 6 GB/sec throughput. For more detailed information on Pivot3 flash arrays and features, click here.
Pivot3 Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Pivot3’s distributed scale-out architecture and innovative hyperconverged software capabilities enable customers to architect a flexible cost-effective DR solution that simple to deploy and scale. Pivot3 enables market-leading capacity and compute efficiencies, allowing as much as 50% lower infrastructure footprint.
Distributed Scale-Out Architecture – Pivot3 HCI solutions based on the vSTAC software platform utilize a patented N-way active distributed scale-out architecture. vSTAC aggregates all available resources in all nodes in a cluster to build a distributed pool of resources. All volumes, virtual machines, and data sets are uniformly distributed across all drives in the cluster, resulting in blazing fast I/O performance. Additionally, the cluster is easily expanded by simply adding more nodes. The distributed scale-out architecture ensures linear and non-disruptive scalability of capacity, compute, I/O performance, and available bandwidth. As a result, predicting incremental hardware requirements for anticipated growth is easy and straightforward.
Erasure Coding – Pivot3 vSTAC utilizes its patented erasure coding (EC) to achieve high availability and fault tolerance, delivering up to 94% usable capacity. Additionally, EC eliminates write IO duplication to protect against failures, further boosting I/O performance of the applications.
vSTAC Operating Environment - Pivot3 vSTAC HCI software platform requires notably less resources to run, allowing for more VM and application density, thus reducing datacenter footprint and associated costs. Pivot3 vSTAC requires less than 10% of host resources, compared to up to 40% by many HCI products. Additionally, performance enhancing smart features like distributed scalable GlobalCache and hypervisor pass-through help enhance storage performance.
Flexible Deployment Options - Pivot3 HCI solutions are available in flexible configurations and several form factors. Enterprises can choose between Hybrid or All-Flash nodes in rack or blade configurations from a broad range of vendors including Cisco, Dell, or Lenovo. Pivot3 data expansion nodes allow flexible capacity and storage I/O expansion without adding compute infrastructure and associated expenses. This flexibility allows customers the architectural freedom to combine disparate form factors to achieve their specific deployment goals.
For more information on Pivot3 HCI offerings, click here.
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Zerto Virtual Replication Zerto offers a virtual-aware, software-only, tier-one, enterprise-class replication solution purpose-built for virtual environments. By moving replication up the stack from the storage layer into the hypervisor, Zerto created the first and only replication solution that delivers enterprise-class, virtual replication and BCDR capabilities for the datacenter and the cloud.
When Zerto Virtual Replication is installed to work with a hypervisor it comprises the following components:
Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) – A Windows service that manages everything required for the replication between the protection and recovery sites, except for the actual replication of data. The ZVM interacts with the hypervisor management user interface, such as vCenter Server or Microsoft SCVMM, to get the inventory of VMs, disks, networks, hosts, etc. and then the Zerto User Interface manages this protection. The ZVM also monitors changes in the hypervisor environment and responds accordingly. For example, a VMware vMotion operation, or Microsoft Live Migration of a protected VM from one host to another is intercepted by the ZVM and the Zerto User Interface is updated accordingly. A Zerto Virtual Manager can manage up to 5000 virtual machines, either being protected by, or recovered to, the Zerto Virtual Manager.
Zerto Virtual Protection Group (VPG) – The logical construct for application protection by ZVR. Virtual machines are put into consistency groups called VPGs by some affinity such as an application or a service or service level tier. The VMs have write-order fidelity between all the VMs in the VPG, which means they are consistent with each other when they are recovered from any previous point in time. VPG recovery testing is non-disruptive to production and can be orchestrated for systematic recovery or migration individually or as part of entire datacenter event.
Virtual Replication Appliance (VRA) – A virtual machine installed on each hypervisor hosting virtual machines to be protected or recovered, to manage the replication of data from protected virtual machines to the recovery site. A VRA can manage a maximum of 1500 volumes, whether these are volumes being protected or recovered.
Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA) – A VBA is a Windows service, which manages back-ups within Zerto Virtual Replication. The VBA service runs on the same machine as the Zerto Virtual Manager service and is responsible for the repositories where offsite backups are stored. These repositories can be local or on a shared network.
Zerto User Interface – Recovery using Zerto Virtual Replication is managed in a browser. The following diagram shows how the main Zerto Virtual Replication components are deployed across hypervisor-based enterprise sites to provide disaster recovery across these sites.
Description of Use Case In this exercise, the production site is supported by an N5 storage array. A Dell PowerEdge R730 XL rack mount server is used to run the workloads to be protected from disasters or outage scenarios. The two workloads to be protected include:
• Microsoft WindowsÒ 2012 R2 Virtual Machine with Microsoft SQLÒ Server 2014
• Microsoft WindowsÒ 10 Virtual Machine
The recovery site consists of 3 Pivot3 vSTAC Hybrid HCI rack mount nodes in a cluster.
Figure 1 shows the architectural diagram for the use case
It should be noted that although this example highlights Pivot3 N5 storage in the production environment and Pivot3 HCI in the recovery environment, the configurations could easily be customized to accommodate Pivot3 HCI in both production and recovery datacenters, or with Pivot3 vSTAC as a disaster recovery target for any third party virtualized environment supported by ZVR.
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Figure 1.1: Disaster Recovery Scenario
Recovery Site Pivot3 vSTAC Setup This guide makes assumptions that the Pivot3 gear has been racked-and–stacked, all SAN and LAN networking is done and that all nodes have been brought into a vCenter.
Please refer to the Setup Guides from the Pivot3 Support Portal for detailed instructions on all the steps needed to get the Pivot3 gear operational.
vCenter Setup
Figure 1.2: vCenter Setup
Stndard vCenter configurations are supported and advised for Pivot3 vSTAC. Log in to vCenter using the vCenter URL and credentials.
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Figure 1.3: Native VMware Functionality with vSTAC
Pivot3 vSTAC supports all native VMware functionalities including Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS), Storage Distributed resource Scheduling (SDRS) and High Availability (HA) features.
Figure 1.4: vSTAC Operating Environment
Each node is treated as a host from vCenter and each vSphere host runs a virtual machine running Pivot3 vSTAC operating environment. vSTAC provides the Hyperconverged capabilities by aggregating storage, compute, RAM and bandwidth resources across the nodes in a cluster.
vSTAC Manager Plug-in
Figure 1.5: Connect to the vSTAC Manager Plug-in
Click on the Pivot3 icon from vCenter home screen.
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Pivot3 vSTAC Array Creation
Figure 1.6: Creating vSTAC Array
vSTAC Array or a vSTAC Virtual Performance Group (vPG) is equivalent to a Cluster where all nodes are clustered and resources are aggregated.
To create a vSTAC cluster, log into the vSTAC vCenter Plug-in. In the ‘Physical” tab, you will see the unassigned appliances available to be used.
Select the 1 of the nodes you plan to use. Then in the upper right hand corner of the vCenter windows you will find a plus sign to start the array creation process.
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Figure 1.7: Creating vSTAC Array
A dialog box will appear with two sections. The top section (Member Appliance) should have the node that was selected when the array creation process was started. The bottom section (Compatible Appliance) are the appliances that are available in the environment to be used.
To add appliances to the “Member Appliance” section, highlight the appliance and click the “Up” dialog box.
To unselect an appliance, select the appliance from the “Member Appliance” section and click on the “down” dialog box.
Figure 1.8: Creating vSTAC Array
Once you have selected all the appliances that you want to be part of the array, click on the “Next” dialog box.
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Figure 1.9: Creating vSTAC Array
Give the array a name.
Click on the “Next” dialog box.
* At any point you can click on the “Back” dialog box to go back and make a change.
* At any point you can click on the “Cancel” dialog box to cancel the setup.
* At any point you can click on the “Help” dialog box to get help.
Figure 1.10: Creating vSTAC Array
This screen allows you to configure all the IP information on the appliances.
The top section is for the “global settings”. This is the Network Mask, Network IP, and Default Gateway.
The bottom section in for IP specific information for that port. The “NIC 0” column is the IP address of the SAN 0 controller ports and “NIC 1” is for SAN 1 controller ports.
To add or change IP information, select the appliance and port that will be configured, and add the IP address.
Once done with all configuration, click on the “Finish” dialog box.
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Figure 1.11: Creating vSTAC Array
Once the array configuration is complete, click on the “Close” dialog box to complete the array creation process.
Figure 1.12: Creating vSTAC Array
Once completed, you will be see the array that was just created and ready to be used.
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Figure 1.13: Creating vSTAC Array
You can see the newly created disk group ready to be used by clicking click on the “Logical” tab.
Logical Volume Creation
Figure 1.14: Creating Logical Volume
To create a new Logical Volume, select the array you want to use and then click on the plus sign in the upper right hand corner of the vSTAC Manager vCenter plug-in.
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Figure 1.15: Creating Logical Volume
Select a name for the Logical Volume.
Figure 1.16: Creating Logical Volume
Select the Erasure Coding level. Depending on the type of Appliance being used and the number of appliances, you will have different options. The options will vary from the following list:
• EC 1
• EC 1P
• EC 3
• EC 3P
• EC 3x
• EC 5
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Figure 1.17: Creating Logical Volume
Choose the disk capacity that you want to allocate to this Logical Volume in Gigabytes. You will see the maximum amount of capacity available. This number will change based on the EC level you select.
Figure 1.18: Creating Logical Volume
If you plan to use “CHAP” select the “Enable CHAP Authentication” check box.
Click on the “Next” dialog box to continue.
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Figure 1.19: Creating Logical Volume
Now it’s time to add the host access information.
The “Host Identifier” is the alias used when configuring the HBA Storage Adapter.
On this screen, you can select if you want the Logical Volume to also be a VMware VMFS datastore. If selected, the vSTAC vCenter Plugin will automate the datastore creation and provisioning.
Figure 1.20: Creating Logical Volume
The “Access” field defines the type of access the Logical Volume will have. The choices are:
• None – Hosts have no access to the Logical Volume at this time
• Read-Only – This gives hosts read access to the Logical Volume
• Read/Write – This gives hosts read & write access to the Logical Volume
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Figure 1.21: Creating Logical Volume
If the CHAP authentication checkbox was selected in the previous section, this is where the secret password is entered. You can either create your own or have one auto generated.
Figure 1.22: Creating Logical Volume
The vSTAC Manager vCenter Plug-in has a few options not available with the regular vSTAC Manager Installable version.
One of those features is the ability to create the data store on ESX as part of the Logical Volume creation. If you want the datastore created, select the checkbox to “Create Datastore” and give it a Datastore Name.
Click on the “Next” dialog box when all the information is entered.
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Figure 1.23: Creating Logical Volume
Review the configuration data, and if all is correct, click on the “Finish” dialog button.
Figure 1.24: Creating Logical Volume
A quick review of the storage available to the ESX hosts shows the newly created Logical Volume available to be used by the server.
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Zerto Virtual Replication Setup Zerto Replication Manager needs to be installed at both locations utilizing Zerto installation documentation. All the latest installation documentation is available at http://zerto.com/myzerto. The ZVR installation and configuration is very straightforward.
1. Install a Zerto Virtual Manager at each site and connect it to the vCenter or SCVMM.
2. Install a Zerto Virtual Replication Appliance on hypervisor host server. ZVR is aware of higher availability and virtual machine workload distribution features such as VMware DRS, vMotion and HA and ZVR will continue to protect and replicate even when the virtual machines are dynamically moved between hypervisor hosts.
3. Pair one or more sites. Creation of site-to-site (Inter-site) replication begins by verifying site connectivity as shown in Figure 2.1.
4. Create the Zerto Virtual Protection Groups as shown in Figures 2.2-2.9.
Figure 2.1: Zerto Virtual Replication Management User Interface
Zerto Virtual Protection Group (VPG) Creation
Figure 2.2: Create VPG wizard
Go to the VPG tab and initiate the VPG creation wizard as shown in Figure 2.2.
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Figure 2.3: VPG Creation - VM Selection
Select the VMs to be protected as shown in Figure 2.3.
Figure 2.4: VPG Creation - Replication Settings
The Replication tab (Figure 2.4) requires selection of the Recovery Site, “COE-Atlanta”, along with specification of ESXi host and datastore at the recovery site. Additionally, Journal History, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and WAN Compression settings are defined here.
Figure 2.5: VPG Creation - Storage Settings
The Storage tab (Figure 2.5) allows you to select thin provisioning, decide if you want to include the swap file in replication, and modify the recovery datastores per VM.
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Figure 2.6: VPG Creation - Recovery Tab
The Recovery tab (Figure 2.6) allows the user to define the Network to be utilized at the recovery site, both during failover, as well as during testing. Additional settings can be defined such as the recovery folder in the recovery datastore and scripts, if any.
Figure 2.7: VPG Creation - NIC & IP Tab
The NIC tab allows configuration of the recovery IP information – either Static or DHCP can be selected for both failover and test scenarios. Checking a specific VM and selecting “Edit Selected” allows entering specific IP parameters – it is very important to note that creation of a new MAC address can be configured – this was required in our testing otherwise duplicate MAC addresses were reported. Figure 2.7
Figure 2.8: VPG Creation - Backup Tab
The Backup tab allows for saving protected VMs offsite, we will review backups later in this document so here we leave this disabled as shown in Figure 2.8.
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Figure 2.9: VPG Creation – Summary Tab
Figure 2.9 illustrates the Summary tab which summarizes all the configuration choices throughout the wizard, select “Done” to create the VPG.
Figure 2.10: Enabling Intra-site Replication - Menu
Next, we create a second VPG that will replicate within the same Site, this may be useful if a recovery site is not in place. In order to configure Intra-site replication, go to the Menu and select Site Settings as shown in Figure 2.10.
Figure 2.11: Enabling Intra-site Replication – Policies Setting
From the Site Settings Menu, go to Policies and enable “Replication to Self” as shown in Figure 2.11.
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Figure 2.12: Intra-site VPG Creation – Summary Tab
Utilizing the procedure detailed earlier, we create a second VPG for Intra-site replication of a single VM as shown in Figure 2.12.
Figure 2.13: VPG Summary – VPG Tab View
The VPG tab shows the two VPGs that we just created as shown in Figure 2.13.
Figure 2.14: VPG Summary – Dashboard View
The Zerto UI dashboard tab shows a summary of all the replication activity including RPO and amount of data protected as illustrated in Figure 2.14.
Note that the RPO (Figure 2.14) is only 8 seconds between the sites. This low of an RPO is not unusual to see even in heavy I/O intensive workloads. Such aggressive RPOs achieved asynchronously is one of the reasons ZVR is widely recognized as the leader in replication and recovery orchestration.
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Test VPG Failover Figure 2.15: Instantiating a Test Failover
Zerto allows non-disruptive to production testing failover of protected VMs to the recovery site without impacting the production site performance or production virtual machine protection. This failover test is instantiated by selecting Failover while in Test mode as shown in Figure 2.15.
Figure 2.16: Instantiating a Test Failover – Selecting VPGs
We next select the VPGs to test as illustrated in Figure 2.16.
Figure 2.17: Test Failover – VPG View
After completing the wizard, we see from the VPG view and the dashboard view that a failover test is executing, this is illustrated in Figures 2.17 and 2.18.
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Figure 2.18: Test Failover – Dashboard View
Figure 2.19: Test Failover – VMs Failed over
Looking at vCenter VMs in both Louisville (Intra-site Replication) and Atlanta (Inter-site Replication), we see the VMs that are involved in the failover testing identified with “testing recovery” prefix as shown in Figure 2.19 and as a verification we log into one of the failed over VMs as demonstrated in Figure 2.20.
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Figure 2.20: Test Failover – Logging into one of the Failed over VMs
Figure 2.21: Test Failover – Stopping Test
Failover Testing is stopped by simply selecting stop from the dashboard or VPG view.
VM Failover / Failback Figure 2.22: Live Failover – Protected Site Down
Next we simulate a failover in which the protected site (Louisville) is down and we need to failover the protected VMs to the recovery site (Atlanta). This action is performed from the Atlanta site because the Louisville site is down, see Figure 2.22.
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Figure 2.23: Live Failover – Protected Site Down – Wizard Failover Summary
Upon completion of the Failover wizard, VMs within the Inter-site Replication VPG are brought online in the recovery site (Atlanta) as shown in Figures 2.23 and 2.24.
Figure 2.24: Live Failover – Protected Site Down – Protected VMs: SQL 2014 and Win 10 online in Atlanta
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Figure 2.25: Live Failover – Not Meeting SLA
Do note that there will be a “Not Meeting SLA” error as a result of Louisville being inaccessible, see Figures 2.25.
Figure 2.26: Live Failback – Original Protected Site Back Up – Updating Inter-site VPG
Once the original protected site (Louisville) comes back online, edit the Inter-site Replication VPG from the Recovery site (Atlanta) so that replication starts back towards Louisville, once the update completes replication will commence and the replication SLA will once again be achieved as shown in Figures 2.26 and 2.27.
Figure 2.27: Live Failback – Original Protected Site Back Up – SLA Met
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Figure 2.28: Live Failback – Original Protected Site Back Up – Moving Inter-site Replication VPG back to Louisville
At this point the Inter-site Replication VPG can be moved back to its original protected site (Louisville) by selecting Actions and Move VPG as Figures 2.28.
Figure 2.29: Move Wizard – Reverse Protection Checkbox
Within the Move wizard be sure that the “Reverse Protection” checkbox is selected so that Zerto Replication continues to protect the VPG in the original direction as shown in Figure 2.29.
Figure 2.30: Move Wizard – Reverse Protection Checkbox
Once complete, VPG replication will be back to its original configuration with Louisville again being the protected site and Atlanta back to the recovery site, see Figure 2.30.
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Offsite Backup Setup and Create Offsite backups can be configured so that backups of the VPG VMs are stored in a repository at the recovery site. This allows for the complete restoration from an archive of a VPG or a single VM in a VPG. It is useful if the duration of the point in time journal (14 days in ZVR 4.5 and 30 days in ZVR version 5.0) is not sufficient.
Figure 2.31: New Backup Repository
In this example, we will use Intra-site Replication VPG because it only contains one VM, hence a smaller backup volume.
From Zerto User Interface, select New Repository from the Setup tab as shown in Figure 2.31.
Figure 2.32: Backup Repository Details
The details of the repository which we named “Test 10” are shown in Figure 2.32 and the summary of the new repository in Figure 2.33.
Figure 2.33: Backup Repository Completion Summary
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Figure 2.34: Scheduling a Backup for Intra-site Replication VPG
Edit the Intra-site Replication VPG and in the Backup tab, toggle Backup to “ON”. Select the backup repository we just created and schedule a backup job as shown in Figure 2.34.
Figure 2.35: Running a Manual Backup for Intra-site Replication VPG
To test the Offsite Backup immediately, select the VPG from the VPG tab and run a manual Offsite Backup as demonstrated in Figure 2.35.
Figure 2.36: Manual Backup Success
The backup will run and the successful completion can be viewed in the Offsite Backup tab as shown in Figure 2.36.
Figure 2.37: VM Backup Files visible in the Repository
And finally if we look at the offsite backup location folder we see the VM backup files (Figure 2.37).
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Restore a VPG from a Repository Figure 2.38: Selecting the Intra-site Replication VPG to Restore from Repository
We will now demonstrate how to restore a VPG from a backup repository, in this example we will restore the VM within the Intra-site Replication VPG from the repository created in the previous section. In the Actions menu, select restore and then the VPG to restore from the list (Figure 2.38).
Figure 2.39: Completing the Restore Wizard
Select the restore point and then the VM settings within the wizard, upon clicking on Restore the VM will be restored (Figures 2.39 and 2.40).
Figure 2.40: Restoring VPG
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Figure 2.41: Intra-site Replication Restore Success:
From within vCenter we see the restored VPG VM (Figures 2.41).
Restore Files from Recovery Site Figure 2.42: File and Folder Restore Wizard – Checkpoint Selection
Files and folders can be restored and downloaded from protected VMs. In the Zerto User Interface, select Restore File from the Actions menu – this will initiate the File and Folder Restore wizard. Select the protected VM and the associated checkpoint to restore from (Figure 2.42).
Figure 2.43: File and Folder Restore Wizard – Mount disk
The associated disks will be presented, select the one to mount and select Start Mount (Figure 2.43).
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Figure 2.44: Disk Mounted – Select Browse Icon
Once the disk is mounted, click on the folder icon to start the download wizard (Figures 2.44 and 2.45).
Figure 2.45: Download Wizard
Figure 2.46: Disk Mounted – Browse Files and Folders
Browse the files and folders on the VM at the recovery site, select those to be downloaded (Figures 2.46 and 2.47).
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Figure 2.47: Disk Mounted – Browse Files and Folders – Start Download
Once the download starts, the files and folders selected will be downloaded to the computer where the recovery/download was initiated.
Summary Pivot3 HCI solutions are ideally suited as the infrastructure foundation for business continuity and disaster recovery. Pivot3 scale-out architecture and innovative software capabilities deliver market leading compute and storage efficiencies while maximizing performance and ensuring predictable linear scalabilities. Zerto Virtual Replication brings robust replication and recovery orchestration, and provides some of the lowest recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives in the industry.
Together, Pivot3 and Zerto provide highly available disaster tolerant infrastructure solutions that deliver the performance, scale, and efficiency required of today’s modern datacenters.