Overview of Recovery Flows
Zerto Virtual Replication enables protecting virtual machines, for both disaster recovery or for extended, longer term recovery from a retention repository, by protecting the relevant virtual machines in virtual protection groups. A virtual protection group (VPG) is a group comprised of virtual machines that are grouped together for recovery purposes. For example, the virtual machines that comprise an application like Microsoft Exchange, where one virtual machine is used for the software, one for the database, and a third for the Web Server require that all three virtual machines be replicated to maintain data integrity.
Once a VPG has been created, each virtual machine in the VPG can be replicated on the recovery site under the VRA on the host specified in the VPG definition as the host for the recovery of the virtual machine.
In addition to disaster recovery and recovery from retention, Zerto Virtual Replication enables recovery of individual files or folders from a certain point of time.
The following are described in this section:
What is Zerto’s Disaster Recovery Operation?
Disaster recovery using Zerto Virtual Replication enables recovering from a disaster to any point between the moment just before the disaster and a specified amount of time in the past up to 30 days. The recovery is done in real time at the recovery site with a minimal RTO.
A recovery operation is one of the following:
■ A failover.
■ A planned move of the protected virtual machines from the protected site to the recovery site.
■ A clone of the protected virtual machine to the recovery site.
What is Zerto’s Disaster Recovery Operation to Azure?
Virtual machines are protected in VPGs, which are defined in the protected site. Once a VPG is created, Zerto Virtual Replication creates a copy of the protected virtual machines under the management of a Virtual Replication Appliance, VRA, on the Azure recovery site. The data managed by the VRA is saved in a storage account.
When a recovery operation is performed, the Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) creates the following:
■ A copy of the virtual machine disks in a dedicated container under the same storage account.
■ The virtual machine disks are moved to a dedicated container under the same storage account.
■ A virtual machine in Azure, under a newly created Resource Group, with the copied disks attached to it.
■ Network Interfaces Cards (NICs) for each NIC of the protected virtual machine.
Once this is done, the ZVM promotes the data from the journal to the virtual machine disks.
The following link references the appropriate procedure to protect virtual machines:
Recovery from: Microsoft Azure | |
For information on disaster recovery flows from Azure to on-premise platforms see:
The following references the procedures to recover virtual machines protected in a VPG:
What is Zerto’s Test Failover Operation in Azure Environments?
When testing that the recovery works as planned, the Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) creates the virtual machines defined in the VPG in a dedicated resource group in Azure. The following references the procedure to recover virtual machines:
What is Zerto’s File or Folder Level Restore?
You can recover specific files and folders from the recovery site for virtual machines that are being protected by Zerto Virtual Replication and running Windows operating systems. You can recover the files and folders from a specific point-in-time.
What is Zerto’s Long Term Retention and Restore VPG?
NOTE: |
You cannot restore a retention set in Azure, or in AWS. For Azure environments, use Windows Azure Backup to restore VPGs. |
If you need to extend the recovery ability to more than the 30 days that are available with disaster recovery, Zerto Virtual Replication provides Long Term Retention that enables saving the protected VPGs for up to one year in a state where they can easily be deployed.
During the retention process, data from the recovery VPGs is saved in a repository as repository sets that can extend as far back as a year. These repository sets are fixed points saved either daily, weekly or monthly.
When a Retention process starts, the DSS communicates with the VRA on the recovery site to create the retention sets of the VPGs, and saves these sets in the repository.
To set up Long Term Retention to protect VPGs, see
“Using Zerto’s Long Term Retention”, on page 204. Configuring Long Term Retention is part of defining a VPG.
After initializing the VPG, Zerto Virtual Replication periodically checks that the time to run a Retention process has not passed. At the scheduled Retention process time, the Retention Process is run and the retention set is stored in the specified repository.
Retention sets are kept for the retention period specified in the VPG’s Retention Policy. Over time the number of stored retention sets are reduced to save space.