The Move Process

Use the Move operation to move groups of protected virtual machines from a protected site to a recovery site in a planned migration.

When you perform a planned migration of virtual machines to a recovery site, Zerto Virtual Replication assumes that both sites are healthy and that you plan to relocate the virtual machines in an orderly fashion without loss of data.

Note: To recover virtual machines on the recovery site during disaster recovery, see “Managing Failover Live to AWS”, on page 159.

If the machines cannot be gracefully shut down, for example, when VMware Tools or Microsoft Integration Services is not available, you must manually shut down the machines before starting the Move operation or forcibly power off the virtual machines as part of the Move operation. If the machines cannot be gracefully shut down automatically and are not shut down manually and the Move operation does not forcibly power them off, the Move operation stops and Zerto Virtual Replication rolls back the virtual machines to their original status.

■ Inserting a clean checkpoint. This avoids potential data loss since the virtual machines are not on and the new checkpoint is created after all I/Os have been written to disk.

■ Transferring all the latest changes that are still in the queue to the recovery site, including the new checkpoint.

■ Creating the virtual machines in the recovery site and attaching each virtual machine to its relevant virtual disks, based on the last checkpoint.

Note: The new instances are created without CD-ROM or DVD drives, even if the protected virtual machines had CD-ROM or DVD drives. Also, as long as the virtual machines are created, the operation is considered successful, even if the virtual machines are not created with their complete definition, for example setting a private IP cannot be performed.

■ Powering on the new instances, making them available to the user. If applicable, the boot order defined in the VPG settings is used to power on the machines.

■ By default, automatically committing the Move operation without testing. However, you can also run basic tests on the new instances to ensure their validity. Depending of the commit/rollback policy that you specified for the operation, the operation is committed, finalizing the move, or rolled back, aborting the operation.

Note: If Keep Source VMs is not selected, and the virtual machines or vCD vApp are already protected in other VPGs, continuing with the operation will cause the virtual machines or vCD vApp to be deleted from other VPGs that are protecting them and to the journals of these VPGs to be reset. In the event of vCD vApp or if no other virtual machines are left to protect, the entire VPG will be removed.

■ Copying data from the S3 buckets to the new EBS disks of the new instances. During this process, the new instances cannot be used. The protected virtual machines are created as new instances in EC2. The default value for new instances in Zerto Virtual Replication is m3.xlarge except in the Asia Pacific (Seoul) region where they are defined as m4.xlarge instances. If these instances do not meet your needs, you can change this value in the Policies tab of the Site Settings dialog, see “Configuring Disaster Recovery Policies”, on page 133. You can also change the instance type of new instances when you create or edit a VPG.

A move differs from a failover in that with a move you cannot select a checkpoint to restore the virtual machine to. Also, to ensure data integrity, the protected virtual machines are powered off completely and a final checkpoint created so that there is no data loss before the move is implemented.