I am off soon to my first Zerto installation (nothing special, just a couple of SQL Servers), so probably this can be a silly question. I am trying to gather as much info as I can, but one thing is not clear for me about if it is necessary to protect the ZVM or not.
Let’s say that the ZVM is installed on a Windows VM. What happens if the VM or Windows crashes? Should I include the VM into the protected machines or just a new installation and use the PRESEED function?
Certainly every setup is different, and everyone has different tools to work with. I’ll outline what I do, and see if it helps you.
I do NOT replicate my ZVM machine via Zerto to my DR location. The reason is, it doesn’t do me any good, if I recover it at my DR location. It has to be at the production location to serve any function.
That said, your point about a VM crash is well founded. To protect the VM from a blue-screen, crash, hardware fault, or really any sort of outage that necessitates the need for me to restore the ZVM machine to a prior point in time (or in its entirety) I use my backup product, in my case, Veeam. I back it up locally (for the quickest restores) and a 2nd copy goes to an offsite repository (so I’m covered in the event of a catastrophic failure).
What this does is lets me have a way to easily restore the ZVM virtual machine, back into my production environment. Let’s say that a Windows update blue-screens the VM and I forgot to take a snapshot first. I simply rollback the VM from backup.
Now, keep in mind, this is only what I do. There are many different way to protect a VM. Perhaps you could even leverage the off-site backup functionality of Zerto. One of their guys could explain that better than I could.
thank you for your comments, this can be really helpful. It’s always good to know how other colleagues manage their environments in order to build your own ‘best practices’.
Andy B.
