Installing the Zerto Solution

Zerto provides a business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) solution in a virtual environment, enabling the replication of mission-critical applications and data as quickly as possible, with minimal data loss. When devising a recovery plan, these two objectives, minimum time to recover and maximum data to recover, are assigned target values: the recovery time objective (RTO) and the recovery point objective (RPO). Zerto enables a virtual-aware recovery with low values for both the RTO and RPO. In addition, Zerto enables protecting virtual machines for extended, longer term recovery using a Long Term Retention process mechanism.

The Zerto Cloud Manager is used to manage both VMware sites where protection of virtual machines is required and the sites where these protected virtual machines are recovered in the following scenarios:

For a cloud service provider providing disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), replicating from a customer organization to the cloud service provider site.

For a cloud service provider providing in the cloud hosting and disaster recovery (ICDR), where customer organization production is hosted by the cloud service provider and the cloud service provider offers disaster recover to another site.

For an enterprise managing all their sites for disaster recovery from a single management interface, as with ICDR.

In all cases, both Zerto Virtual Managers and a Zerto Cloud Manager must be configured.

The Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) is a Windows service that manages replication at the site level. The ZVM monitors the hypervisor management tool to get the inventory of virtual machines, disks, networks, hosts, etc. For example, a VMware vMotion operation of a protected virtual machine from one host to another is monitored by the ZVM and the protection and recovery is updated accordingly.

The Zerto Cloud Manager (ZCM) is a Windows service that manages all your VMware sites offering disaster recovery, either as a service or completely within the cloud environment, protecting on one cloud site and recovering to a second site.

As can be seen in the diagram above, each site has a ZVM installed. One site has the Zerto Cloud Manager installed to manage all the sites.

A Virtual Backup Appliance (VBA) is a Windows service that manages File Level Recovery operations within Zerto.

Continue to the following topics:

Requirements - before installing Zerto Cloud Manager
How to Install Zerto Cloud Manager
Troubleshooting the Installation
Firewall Ports Used With Zerto
Uninstalling Zerto
Upgrading Zerto