Protecting Virtual Machines to and From vCloud Director

When VMware vCloud Director (vCD) is installed at either the protected or recovery site, protection involving vCD can be set up to cope with the following situations:

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A disaster, enabling recovery to a point in time in the 30 days prior to the disaster.

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The need to retain files saved either daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. The same wizard is used to set up both disaster recovery and the retention policy.

Use any of the following procedures depending on the site to which you need to recover:

From a Protected Site	To a Recovery Site	See Procedure...
vCenter Server	To a different recovery site vCD	Replication From a Protected Site vCenter Server to a Recovery Site vCD
VMware vCloud Director (vCD)	To a recovery site vCD	Replication From a Protected Site vCD to a Recovery Site vCD
	To a recovery site vCenter Server	Replication From a Protected Site vCD to a Recovery Site vCenter Server
	To a Hyper-V site	Replication From a Protected Site vCD to Hyper-V
	To a Amazon Web Services (AWS) site	Replication From a Protected Site vCD to AWS
	To a Microsoft Azure site	Replication From a Protected Site vCD to Azure

Consider the following:

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When the vCloud Director (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.

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Both the VM-level and vCD vApp-level metadata is also replicated to the recovery site. However, Zerto 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.

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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.

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When vCD 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 storage.

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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 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.

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You cannot protect the following virtual machines: