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”, on page 355.

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.

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 re-IP cannot be performed.

■ Preventing automatically moving virtual machines to other hosts: Setting HA to prevent DRS. This prevents automatic vMotioning of the affected virtual machines during the Move operation.

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

Note: If the virtual machines do not power on, the process continues and the virtual machines must be powered on manually. The virtual machines cannot be powered on automatically in a number of situations, such as when there are not enough resources in the resource pool, or the required MAC address is part of a reserved range, or there is a MAC address conflict or IP conflict, for example, if a clone was previously created with the MAC or IP address.

■ Committing the Move operation. The default is to automatically commit the Move operation without testing. However, you can also run basic tests on the machines to ensure their validity to the clean checkpoint. Depending on 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.

If reverse protection is not possible, the original protected site virtual machines or vCD vApp are not powered off and removed.

Protecting virtual machines or vCD vApps in several VPGs is enabled only if both the protected site and the recovery site, as well as the VRAs installed on these sites, are of version 5.0 and higher.

■ Promoting the data from the journal to the machines. The machines can be used during the promotion and Zerto Virtual Replication ensures that the user sees the latest image, even if this image, in part, includes data from the journal.

Note: Virtual machines cannot be moved to another host during promotion. If the host is rebooted during promotion, make sure that the VRA on the host is running and communicating with the Zerto Virtual Manager before starting up the recovered virtual machines.

■ If reverse protection is specified, the virtual disks used by the virtual machines in the protected site are used for the reverse protection. A Delta Sync is performed to make sure that the two copies, the new recovery site disks and the original protected site disks, are consistent. A Delta Sync is required since the recovered machines can be updated while data is being promoted.

If reverse protection is not specified, the VPG definition is saved but the state is Needs configuration and the virtual disks used by the virtual machines in the protected site are deleted. Thus, in the future if reverse protection is required, the original virtual disks are not available and an initial synchronization is required.

Note: If reverse protection is specified, the Keep Source VMs option is grayed out because the virtual disks of the VMs are used for replication and cannot have VMs attached. If Keep Source VMs is selected before reverse protection is specified, the Keep Source VMs selection is canceled.

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.