Protecting Virtual Machines to and From vCloud Director
  
Protecting Virtual Machines to and From vCloud Director
When VMware vCloud Director is installed at either the protected or recovery site, protection involving vCD can be as follows:
Replication From a Protected Site vCenter Server to a Recovery Site vCloud Director
Replication From Protected Site vCloud Director to a Recovery Site vCloud Director
Replication From Protected Site vCloud Director to a Recovery Site vCenter Server
Replication From a Protected Site vCloud Director to Hyper-V
Replication From a Protected Site vCloud Director to AWS
The protection can be for set up to cope with a disaster, enabling recovery to any point in time in the 14 days prior to the disaster or extended recovery to backup files saved either daily or weekly for a period of up to one year. The same dialog is used to set up both disaster recover and extended recovery.
When the vCD site is set up within Zerto Cloud Manager, as described in Zerto Cloud Manager Administration Guide, the vCenter Server underlying the vCD for the site cannot be specified as either the protected site or recovery site. When Zerto Cloud Manager is not used, the vCenter Server underlying the vCD can be specified.
Both the VM-level and vCD vApp-level metadata is also replicated to the recovery site. However, Zerto Virtual Replication does not replicate fenced mode settings. If fenced mode is configured in the vCD, it must be enabled for recovered virtual machines after a failover or move. This can lead to clashes with MAC addresses and IP addresses. If this occurs the MAC address or IP address must be configured after the failover or move. Both the VM-level and vCD vApp-level metadata is not replicated when the recovery site is not vCD.
Note: In the properties for the vCD vApp to be protected make sure that the Start Action in the Starting and Stopping VMs tab is set to Power On.
When vCloud Director is used, you can have the journals on separate datastores from the recovery volumes. For example, you might prefer to keep the recovery volumes on storage with better performance, security, and reliability and the journal on less expensive storage1.
Note: You cannot protect virtual machines with VirtualEthernetCardLegacyNetworkBackingInfo NICs or with IDE devices.

1 As part of recovery after a failover or move operation, the data in the journal is promoted to the recovered virtual machines. During this promotion, the virtual machines can be used, and Zerto Virtual Replication makes sure that what the user sees is the latest data, whether from the virtual machine disks or from the journal. If the journal is on a slow storage device, this is reflected in the response time the user experiences.