One of the most common requests I hear in my role at Zerto is to automate the protection of VMs. The 2 main use cases for this request are typically:
- Bulk VM protection during initial installation or re-installation. I.E you have 800 VMs to re-protect to a new datacenter and it would make more sense to automate the process (which came from a recent customer request).
- Automate the protection of new VMs. I.E you have new VMs being created on an hourly/daily/weekly basis be it from templates, vRealize Orchestrator or a self-service catalog and you want to automate the protection of VMs without having to manually configure DR.
The good news is that both of these use cases are easily achievable using Zerto Virtual Replication 4.5, PowerShell and the new APIs, with the examples I’m going to give you.
Before getting stuck into these examples of how you can do this the first consideration is whether you are utilizing a Zerto Cloud Manager (ZCM) in your environment to manage your Zerto Virtual Managers (ZVMs). For those of you who might not know what a ZCM is, it is the Zerto manager of managers that enables a single pane of glass across any number of sites that also enables multi-tenancy, resource abstraction and key for this topic; service profiles. It doesn’t require any extra licensing and is recommended for any medium to large enterprise.
For both use cases of bulk VM protection and Automated protection of new VMs I will be creating 2 blog posts. One will be for ZVMs not managed by a ZCM which don’t leverage service profiles (as this is a ZCM only feature) and the second will be the opposite, requiring the ZVM to be managed by a ZCM with a new service profile applied (not the default).
Following are the examples of how to automate bulk VM protection:
ZVM only:
https://virtuallysober.com/2016/05/11/automating-bulk-vm-protection-with-zerto-virtual-replication-zvm-only/
ZVM & ZCM:
https://virtuallysober.com/2016/05/13/automating-bulk-vm-protection-zvm-zcm/
Following are the examples of how to automate VM Protection with vRO and Zerto Virtual Replication :
ZVM only:
https://virtuallysober.com/2016/05/24/automate-vm-protection-with-vro-zerto-virtual-replication-zvm-only/
ZVM & ZCM:
https://virtuallysober.com/2016/05/24/automate-vm-protection-with-vro-zerto-virtual-replication-zvm-zcm/
I will continue to add more links as I finish writing them up. Thanks for reading and happy scripting!
Joshua