This is Blog 3 in the Zerto Replication 4.0 Series.  This blog will cover the Virtual Protection Group (VPG) setup.

Current Setup

• Production Cluster of 2 hosts
• DR Cluster of 1 host
• ZVM has been deployed at both sites on Windows 2012 R2
• VRAs have been installed at each site
• Sites have been paired

VPG Creation

Once you have logged into the ZVM Interface go to “VPGs” and “New VPG”

Specify a VPG Name and the Priority Level

Select the VMs available that you need to protect. Define the boot order and the boot delay.

At this point you are ready to define the replication.

Replicate To: Define the Recover Site

Default Recover Servers: Define Cluster/Host and Datastore for Protection

SLA: Define Journal History, Target RPO Alerting and a Test Reminder. The advanced journal settings tab will be detailed next.

Advanced: Enable WAN Compression (Like this feature!)

Advanced Journal Settings

You can define the Journal History, Journal Datastore, Journal Size Hard Limit and Journal Size Warning Threshold

You can also edit an individual VM by selecting VM Settings

There you can change these default options

The next step is to review or change the storage selection.  If you need to change the target then “Edit Selected” after selecting the VM

You can then define the Volume Source and Target Datastore

Next Step is Recovery.  You will define the following:

Failover/Move Network, Failover Test Network and the Recovery Folder.  You can also define any scripts that you may need to run.

Review the NICs Section. Here you can edit individual VMs. This is need if you need to change IPs in the event of a failover or test.

Define the Network, MAC Address and IP configuration for testing and failover

There is an option for a “Backup” as well.  I will not be going over this but below is a screenshot of what you can do.

Summary of the VPG. Click done to start Replication

Go back to the VPG Section and the VPG will now be listed and in “Initial Sync”.

Once it has completed you will see several different things including SLA and RPO.

You can then toggle over to performance and see actual performance related stats

My next blog in the series will cover the “Test Failover”.