• This topic has 3 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated June 18, 2015 by Sam N.

What is the best setup?

  • Sharad A
    June 11, 2015 02:52:22 PM

    Hey guys, I am evaluating Zerto (along with Arcserve and Veeam) and wanted to see the best way to setup Zerto up.

    I have 2 ESX hosts (Host A and B) at the main site and 1 DR host at the DR site (Host C); I do have two vcenters, one at main and one at DR….both vcenters are VMs at their respective sites

    I was hoping that I could replicate from Host A to Host B and C but looks like Zerto doesn’t support multiple replications yet which is fine.

    So…I guess I simply replicate Host A and B to Host C? Do I need some sort of ‘Zerto’ VM on each host? Or can I have it setup somewhere on another physical server at each site?

    How does it handle SQL? IIS? How does the failback work?

    Thanks.

     

     

    Sean M
    June 11, 2015 03:45:10 PM

    Given you have two vCenters each managing their own hosts and storage, then from a Zerto perspective you’ve got two datacenters. You simply setup Zerto at each site and protect the VMs from one site to another.

    I’d recommend checking out our Quick Start guide (available on the Support portal) for more specifics.

    Justin M
    June 11, 2015 04:13:24 PM

    As Sean mentioned, it would be best to check out the quick start guide.

    As the engineer running Zerto as a Cloud Provider, I can tell you that you would essentially need one ZVM per “site” (IE: datacenter) along with 1 Z-VRA per host.  The ZVM is a windows server deployment with Zerto software installed on it. The VRAs are appliances that are deployed after the installation.

    Managing failover and failback is very easy using Zerto. The most “difficult” part would be ensuring that you have the proper networking setup outside of Zerto to allow for proper communication to and from.

    Most definitely check out the Zerto guides.  I think you’d be very happy with the solution

    Sam N
    June 18, 2015 09:14:20 PM

    I have deployed my Zerto implementation in a similar environment to yours.  We are still ramping up our DR site and will begin heavy testing very soon.  One of the beautiful things of Zerto, is that it doesn’t care about your storage or hosts on either side – only about the I/O between them.

    For instance, my production site is cisco ucs over twinax to nexus to an NFS SAN.  My DR is dell over cat6 to force10 to an iSCSI SAN.

    Now for the particular applications you are protecting, depending on how it is logically configured, you may want to setup specific drives as swap only for like pagefiles and things to reduce the I/O going across the WAN.

    I reviewed Veeam before choosing Zerto for replication and disaster recovery because Zerto not only handled the replication, but also the orchestration of the failover/failback.  At the time (if my memory serves me), veeam would do the replication, but you needed something else (VMware SRM, etc) to handle the orchestration.

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