Is it recommended to protect the vCenter Server?

  • Daniel M
    August 25, 2017 05:15:07 PM

    I have been using Zerto Replication in VMWare environment since January of this year.

    Recently I had an issue that required a support call. during this call I had asked if I was supposed to be replicating the ZVA and was told no which is understandable.

    My question today is should I be replicating the protected site vCenter? I am not sure if this will cause issues or not but in the event of a total disaster I would like to recover in full if possible.

    Harry S
    August 31, 2017 12:37:00 PM

    Hi Daniel,

    Thanks for your post. Are you suggesting replicating vCenter with ZVR to another site in case of a disaster impacting vCenter? The recommended practice is no. You would ideally want at least another vCenter and ZVM at the recovery site that you can access in the event of a disaster.

    Are you implying you have just one vCenter in your current setup, hence your question? If that’s the case, customers typically want to place that vCenter on the recovery site in order to be able to recover rapidly in the case of the production site becoming impacted.

    Hope this helps! If you want to provide further clarity, I’m happy to try and elaborate for you to some degree (since a deeper architectural discussion should be happening with your partner/account team).

    Thanks,

    ~Harry

    Follow me: www.twitter.com/HarrySiii
    Daniel M
    September 15, 2017 03:24:54 PM

    Hi Harry,

     

    I have two vCenters (1 at the Recovery Site and 1 at the protected Site)

     

    I am actually now in a situation where this would have been useful.

     

    During the storm this week my entire Virtual Environment went down and due to improper shutdown in our SAN Disks we had some data corruption.

    Well my Protected Site vCenter Server was corrupted to the point where it will no longer work.

    Since Zerto depends on vCenter server to work my protected is no longer protected.

     

    When I reached out to support for help with having to rebuild by Protected Site vCenter and creating a new Database (due to corruption) the Knoweldge Article basically said I now have to uninstall and remove my Zerto Software from Recovery Site and Protected Site and basically start over. It does mention that I could delete the VPGs and keep the recovery disks; well that is impossible because my Protected Site ZVM user interface is not available and you cannot delete VPGs from the Recovery Site.

     

    My original question was.

     

    On the protected Site, can I add my vCenter server to a VPG for protection in the event of a disaster (such as the one I am experiencing now) or would this cause issues.

     

    In hind-site I probably should have just done it or at least took a snapshot.

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