Issue link: https://insights.oneneck.com/i/1186400
VM VRA VM WEB APP DB VM VM VM vCenter ZVM VMDK VMDK VMDK VMDK VM VMDK VMDK VM VMDK VMDK Production Site ESX/ESXi VRA VM LDAP APP WEB VM VM VMDK VMDK VMDK VM VM VMDK ESX/ESXi Virtual Protection Group (VPG) Recovery Site 18 DISASTER RECOVERY GUIDE – Powered by ZERTO Application-centric protection: Virtual Protection Groups Many enterprise applications consist of more than one virtual server – a web server, application server, database server – which are interdependent. When recovery is needed, all servers must be recovered from a single, consistent point in time. To be able to do that, Zerto developed Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs), which ensure consistency across a group of VMs. In this way the Zerto solution ensures that enterprise applications are replicated and recovered with consistency, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. Zerto recognizes and preserves these relationships while enabling critical VMware features such as DRS, vMotion and Storage vMotion. • Consistent – Replicates and recovers complete multi-VM applications consistently • Flexible – Enables organizations to deploy an application across different physical devices to maximize performance, capacity or to reduce the complexity of the infrastructure • Granular – Delivers the right granularity to be able to recover single VMs as well as groups of VMs through many types of disasters • Prioritize – Prioritize Virtual Protection Groups for replication and recovery • Support – Supports virtualization features like vMotion, svMotion, HA, etc Figure 5. The various VMs comprising an application are in a Virtual Protection Group and are replicated consistently even if they are spread over various hosts and datastores. Fully Automated and Orchestrated Replicating the data to the recovery site is only half the issue. The information that is there to protect a business in the event of a disaster needs to be easy to use. Zerto recognized this issue and built in automated and orchestrated processes that can be executed in just a few clicks when IT is in the middle of a high- pressure situation. Fully configured failover process Part of the VPG configuration is to set up the failover process. As part of this configuration boot order, re-IP on failover, length of Journal, and other parameters are configured. With all this up-front work done, this greatly simplifies the recovery process, reducing it to just a few clicks. Failover as a business decision Since every disaster is different, Zerto believes that failover needs to be a business decision and not an automated process. Because it is possible to pick a moment in time, this decision phase is essential for a correct failover. Aer clicking the failover button, an automated and orchestrated process will be started to bring services back online. In this way a failover can be done with the ability to choose a point in time, for example the point in time just before a database corruption occurred.