We are currently running Zerto against 2007 and it is working well. we are now upgrading to 2013 and are looking to pull a design together. we like the sounds of the local DAG model, so if 1 server goes down the other kicks in automatically with zero data loss and no downtime. BUT what if the whole site goes down. Having a remote server seems to be the option but that seems to require a lot of powershell commands to get that up and running. We have Zerto currently and i saw a forum post in the vmware thread saying that Zerto works with DAG’s but doesn’t go in to any detail. any ideas how that work work? thanks Lee
Long time no speak and I hope you are well. Zerto can definitely be used to protect DAGs and you can protect one DAG member or both, its completely up to you. There isn’t any problems with protecting DAGs using Zerto as each DAG node has its own disks and only the cluster IP is shared between the nodes.
The only catches I would highlight are:
If you protect both nodes you will need double the storage in the recovery site
If the recovery site has a different IP subnet you should configure the cluster to have an IP in this site with associated NICs which you can validate in a failover test operation
As DAGs are reliant on AD, DNS and a Global Catalog server I’d make sure you have a domain controller (DC) for that DAG site in a VPG for failover testing and another or the same DC in the DR site for a failover.
As a customer I used to have 2 DAGs nodes in my primary DC for HA with 1 protected by Zerto for DR and it worked perfectly.
Joshua S.
