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As a Zerto Cloud Service Provider, we are happy to provide DRaaS from an on-premise vCenter to our vCloud platform.

Part one of this blog series will detail the Zerto replication setup.

Prerequisites

  • A Cloudhelix vCD organisation
  • VPN or other connectivity between the on-premise network and the vCloud network
  • IP of Zerto Cloud Connector (configured by Cloudhelix?—?this is an IP from your Org VDC network)
  • A Windows VM to run the Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM)

Setup

My demo on-premise network is 172.16.123.0/24, with a vCloud Org VDC Network of 172.16.124.0/24. A VPN has been configured to the vShield Edge inside my Org VDC to provide routing between the two networks.

The first step is to set up the on-premise ZVM?—?this is a straightforward install with minimal input required 🙂

After accepting the EULA you are prompted to choose an installation type?—?choose Express.

Fill in your vCenter credentials.

Look for some green ticks.

Once the install completes, tick the box to open the ZVM interface?—?this will point your browser to the ZVM URL.

Select ‘Start by pairing to a site with a license’ and enter the ZCC IP.

Once pairing completes, click on the large Manage VRAs button to be taken to the Setup -> VRAs screen.

Select each host and click Actions -> Install?—?complete the details and click ‘Install’.

Multiple install operations can be run in parallel and the hosts do not need to be in maintenance mode. If you keep an eye on your vCenter tasks window you’ll see a VM being created on each host?—?this is the VRA.

Look for a nice green status again.

The next step is to create a virtual protection group (VPG)?—?a group of VMs that, when failed over, will become a vApp.

Click the ‘New VPG’ button on the top right.

Enter a VPG Name
Select the Org VDC from the dropdown on the right
Tick vCD Guest Customization
Select Failover/Move and Failover Test networks
Click the ‘Add’ button to select your VMs
Highlight each VM in turn and click ‘Configure’.

Here I have selected the Failover/Move NIC, specified the IP address the VM will have when failed over, and also configured the mac-address to be reset.

Finally, click save to add the VPG and be taken to its page in the GUI. After an initial sync the VPG is meeting SLA with an RPO of 4 seconds!

So there you have it?—?with 5–10 minutes work your VMs can easily be replicated to our Cloud platform.

Posts in this series

Part 1: Zerto DRaaS Initial Customer Setup

Part 2: Zerto DRaaS Failover Test

Part 3: Zerto DRaaS Live Failover

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