Update: Migrate VM from Hyper-V to vSphere with Pre-Installed VMware Tools (vSphere 7 and 8 Edition)

I had previously written a post in response to a problem a customer was facing with migrating from Microsoft Hyper-V to VM vSphere.

You can find that previous post here: Migrate VM from Hyper-V to vSphere with Pre-Installed VMware Tools

I am writing this as a follow-up, because while the workaround I documented still works (for vSphere 6.x VMware Tools), something with the VMware Tools had changed when vSphere 7 went GA.  Several attempts to manipulate the new .msi file proved to not work, and in the flurry of life, I hadn’t had a chance to really sit down and figure it out.  So, the workaround for “now” was to install the working 6.x version, get migrated, and then upgrade VMware Tools; and that still works, by the way.

Then one day, I was going through my blog comments someone had responded, saying they’d figured it out.  @Chris, thank you very much for sharing your find!

So, since vSphere 8 recently went GA, I figured I’d also test this procedure on VMware Tools 12, and I’m happy to say, it also works.  So here’s what’s changed from the previous post when you’re trying to do the same using VMware Tools 11 (vSphere 7) or VMware Tools 12 (vSphere 8).

What You Will Need

Before you can get started, you’ll need to get a few things.  For details on how to get these requirements, refer to the original post mentioned above. 

  • Microsoft Orca (allows you to edit .msi files) – This is part of the Windows SDK, so if you don’t have it, see the post referenced above for the link to download as well as the procedure to only install Orca.
  • VMware Tools 11 or 12
  • Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable (if you’re following the procedure to get the VMware Tools from your own system, be sure to grab the vcredist_x64.exe)

If you would like to skip editing the VMware Tools MSI, you can download already “jailbroken” versions below. 

Note: These worked in the testing I performed, and I will not be making any changes to them, supporting them, or be responsible for what you download off of the Internet.  To be absolutely sure you have complete control over what you install in your environment (ESPECIALLY IN PRODUCTION), download from trusted sources and perform the edit to the MSI yourself.

Edit VMware Tools MSI with Orca (for VMware Tools 11 and VMware Tools 12)

  1. Launch Orca
  2. Click Open, and browse to where you saved VMware Tools64.msi, select it, and click Open.

    Launch Orca and Open VMware Tools MSI

  3. In the left window pane labeled Tables, scroll down and click on CustomAction.
  4. In the right window pane, look for the line that says VM_LogStart, right-click it, and select Drop Row.
  5. When prompted, click OK to confirm.


  6. In the left window pane labeled Tables, scroll down and click on InstallUISequence.
  7. In the right window pane, look for the line that says VM_CheckRequirements. Right-click on this entry, and select Drop Row.
  8. When prompted, click OK to confirm.

    InstallUISequence > VM_CheckRequirements > Drop Row

  9. Click save on the toolbar, and close the MSI file. You can also exit Orca now.

Next Steps

Now that you’ve successfully edited the MSI file to be able to be installed on your Hyper-V Windows VMs, copy the installers (don’t forget vcredist_x64.exe) and install.  When it asks for a reboot, you can safely ignore it, because once the VM boots up in vSphere, it would have already taken care of that for you.  (One less disruption to your production Hyper-V virtual machine).

Thanks for reading! GLHF

If you found this useful and know of any others looking to do the same, please share and comment.  I’d like to hear if/how it’s helped you out! If you’d like to reach me on social media, you can also follow me and DM me on Twitter @eugenejtorres

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Zerto 9.0 Introduces New Enhancements to LTR with Amazon S3, and Here’s What you Need to Know

Zerto 9.0 went GA on July 13, 2021, and the official launch webinar was today (July 29, 2021), but if you missed it, you can head to the following URL and register to watch it on-demand:

https://www.zerto.com/page/zerto-9-live-demo-instant-ransomware-recovery/

While there are many new enhancements that I’m not going to cover here, this blog is specifically related to the changes made to the product to bring even more value, cost savings, and security to Amazon S3 repositories used with Zerto’s Long-term Retention (Backup).

Along with these changes, you can sure expect an updated technical document that will cover all the steps and requirements (in detail) to take advantage of the new features. I will also update this post with a link to the updated document once it becomes available.

Update: The latest version of the published document I wrote to accommodate this blog post titled “Deploy & Configure Zerto Long-term Retention for Amazon S3” can be found here: https://bit.ly/ZLTRAWSS3

Auto-Tiering for Data Backed up to Amazon S3

The first enhancement I want to cover here is automatic tiering of retention sets after they’ve aged, meaning Zerto will automatically move backup data from Amazon S3 Standard to Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, and then again (if desired) to Amazon S3 Glacier.

Here is what it looks like when creating a repository in Zerto:

Now, when Zerto customers are backing up to Amazon S3, they can take advantage of better pricing as data ages, reducing cost and enabling more efficient use of storage. The new feature is enabled by default in a fresh install. If you are upgrading from a previous version, tiering will not be enabled by default, so you’ll need to enable it on an existing Amazon S3 repository, or create a new one. There are no additional configuration changes required to take advantage of this new feature.

Retention Set Immutability via Amazon S3 Object Lock

With Ransomware attacks continuing to rise (150% increase in 2020), the need to protect backup data via immutability becomes more important than ever. Customers can now specify whether or not they would like to enable immutability, which offers better protection from data either being deleted or otherwise compromised after it has been written.

While tiering doesn’t require any additional configuration, here are some things you’re going to need to know if you plan on using Zerto’s immutability feature with or without tiering:

  • You cannot enable S3 Object Lock on an existing S3 bucket. This is an AWS limitation. You will need to create a new S3 bucket to store immutable backups, and then create a new repository in Zerto.
  • You can have a repository that takes advantage of both of these new features, however, because of the object lock limitation on buckets (cannot be changed after the fact), you are still going to need a new repository (S3 bucket).
  • There are some additional permissions for the IAM policy (covered below) required in order to take advantage of immutability.
  • There are some additional features (covered below) you will need to enable on the S3 bucket to take advantage of immutability.
  • If you’ve enabled S3 bucket encryption per my previous blog post in an earlier version of Zerto, the good news is that you can still have encryption enabled along with these new features.

Updated IAM Policy Permissions Required for Amazon S3

Here is the updated list of S3 permissions required in your IAM policy to take advantage of these new features. If you have an existing policy in use today, I’ve highlighted the additional permissions required (in bold), so you can easily update that policy. If you’d like a JSON version of the permissions for use with Amazon IAM policy creation, you can get the file from Zerto’s GitHub repo:

https://github.com/ZertoPublic/Zerto9-LTR-AWS-IAM-JSON

  • S3:ListBucket
  • S3:ListBucketVersions
  • S3:GetBucketObjectLockConfiguration
  • S3:GetObject
  • S3:GetObjectAcl
  • S3:GetObjectVersion
  • S3:DeleteObject
  • S3:DeleteObjectVersion
  • S3:PutObject
  • S3:PutObjectRetention
  • S3:RestoreObject
  • S3:DeleteBucketPolicy
  • S3:PutObjectACL

Amazon S3 Bucket Configuration for Immutability

In order to enable Immutability for the Amazon S3 bucket, you’re going to have to create a new bucket. Enabling S3 Object Lock has to be done at time of creation, so as you’re creating your new S3 bucket, be sure to include the following options:

  • Enable S3 Bucket Versioning (This is required in order to enable Object Lock – See the screenshots below)
  • Under Advanced Settings for the bucket, enable Object Lock, and tick the box to acknowledge that enabling Object Lock will permanently allow objects in this bucket to be locked.

There you have it! I’ve done quite a bit of testing with the new feature and am excited that we’re able to provide these new capabilities to meet our customer requirements and better safeguard them! We’ve also got similar enhancements for Azure users (however no immutability – yet), and I am planning on creating a technical document for setting this up in Azure, so stay tuned for that as well 🙂

If you have found this to be useful, please comment, or share so others are also aware. Thanks for reading 🙂

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How To: Migrate Windows Server 2003 to Azure via Zerto, Easily

So since Microsoft has officially ended extended support for Windows Server on July 15, 2015, that means that you may not be able to get support or any software updates. While many enterprises are working towards being able to migrate applications to more current versions of Windows, alongside initiatives to adopt more cloud services; being able to migrate the deprecated OS to Azure is an option to enable that strategy and provide a place for those applications to run in the meantime.

Be aware though that although Microsoft support (read this) may be able to help you troubleshoot running Windows Server 2003 in Azure, that doesn’t necessarily mean they will support the OS. That said, if you are running vSphere on-premises and still wish to get these legacy systems out of your data center and into Azure, keep reading and I’ll show you how to do it with Zerto.

Please note that I’ve only tested this with the 64-bit version of the OS (Windows Server 2003 R2). EDIT: this has also been verified to work on the 32-bit version of the OS – Thanks Frank!)

The Other Options…

While the next options are totally doable, think about the amount of time involved, especially if you have to migrate VMs at scale. Once you’re done taking a look at these procedures, head to the next section. Trust me, it can be done more easily and efficiently.

  • Migrate your VMs from VMware to Hyper-V
    • … Then migrate them to Azure. Yes, it’s an option, but from what I’ve read, it’s really just so you can get the Hyper-V Integration Services onto the VM before you move it to Azure. From there, you’ll need to manually upload the VHDs to Azure using the command line, followed by creating instances and mounting them to the disks. Wait – there’s got to be a better way, right?
  • Why migrate when you can just do all the work from vSphere, run a bunch of powershell code, hack the registry, convert the disk to VHD, upload, etc… and then rinse and repeat for 10’s or 100’s of servers?
    • While this is another way to do it, take a look at the procedure and let me know if you would want to go through all that for even JUST ONE VM?!
  • Nested Virtualization in Azure
    • Here’s another way to do it, which I can see working, however, you’re talking about nesting a virtual environment in the cloud and perhaps run production that way? While even if you have Zerto you can technically do this, there would have to be a lot of consideration that goes in to this… and likely headache.

Before You Start

Before you start walking through the steps below, this how-to assumes:

  1. You are running the latest version of Zerto at each site.
  2. You have already paired your Azure ZCA (Zerto Cloud Appliance) to your on-premises ZVM (Zerto Virtual Manager)
  3. You already know how to create a VPG in Zerto to replicate the workload(s) to your Azure subscription.

Understand that while this may work, this solution will not be supported by Zerto, this how-to is solely written by me, and I have tested and found this to work. It’s up to you to test it.

Additionally, this is likely not going to get any support from Microsoft, so you should test this procedure on your own and get familiar with it.

This does require you to download files to install (if you don’t have a Hyper-V environment), so although I have provided a download link below, you are responsible for ensuring that you are following security policies, best practices, and requirements whenever downloading files from the internet. Please do the right thing and be sure to scan any files you download that don’t come directly from the manufacturer.

Finally – yeah, you should really test it to make sure it works for you.

Migrating Legacy OS Using Zerto

Alright, you’ve made it this far, and now you want to know how I ended up getting a Windows Server 2003 R2 VM from vSphere to Azure with a few simple steps.

Step 1: Prepare the VM(s)

First of all, you will need to download the Hyper-V Integration Services (think of them as VMware Tools, but for Hyper-V, which will contain the proper drivers for the VM to function in Azure).

I highly suggest you obtain the file directly from Microsoft if at all possible, or from a trustworthy source. At the least, deploy a Hyper-V server and extract the installer from it yourself.

If you have no way to get the installer files for the Hyper-V Integration Services, you can download at your own risk from here. It is the exact same copy I used in my testing, and will work with Windows Server 2003 R2.

  1. Obtain the Hyper-V Integration Services ISO file. (hint: look above)
  2. Once downloaded, you can mount the ISO to the target VM and explore the contents. (don’t run it, because it will not allow you to run the tools installation on a VMware-hosted workload).
  3. Extract the Support folder and all of it’s contents to the root of C: or somewhere easily accessible.
  4. Create a windows batch file (.bat) in the support folder that you have just extracted to your VM. I put the folder in the root of C:, so just be aware that I am working with the C:\Support folder on my system.
  5. For the contents of the batch file, change directory to the C:\Support\amd64 folder (use the x86 folder if on 32-bit), then on the next line type: setup.exe /quiet (see example below). The /quiet switch is very important, because you will need this to run without any intervention.

    Example of batch file contents and folder path
  6. Save the batch file.
  7. On the same VM, go to Control Panel > Scheduled Tasks > Add Scheduled Task. Doing so will open the Scheduled Task Wizard.

    Create a scheduled task
  8. Click Next
  9. Click browse and locate the batch file you created in step 5-6, and click open

    Browse to the batch file
  10. Select when my computer starts, and click next

    Select when my computer starts
  11. Enter local administrator credentials (will be required because you will not initially have network connectivity), and click next

    enter admin credentials
  12. Click Finish

Step 2: Create a VPG in Zerto

The previous steps will now have your system prepared to start replicating to Azure. Furthermore, what we just did, basically will allow the Hyper-V Integration Services to install on the Azure instance upon boot, therefore enabling network access to manage it. It’s that simple.

Create the VPG (Virtual Protection Group) in Zerto that contains the Windows Server 2003 R2 VM(s) that you’ve prepped, and for your replication target, select your Microsoft Azure site.

If you need to learn how to create a VPG in Zerto, please refer to the vSphere Administration Guide – Zerto Virtual Manager documentation.

Step 3: Run a Failover Test for the VPG

Once your VPG is in a “Meeting SLA” state, you’re ready to start testing in Azure before you actually execute the migration, to ensure that the VM(s) will boot and be available.

Using the Zerto Failover Test operation will allow you to keep the systems running back on-premises, meanwhile booting them up in Azure for testing to get your results before you actually perform the Move operation to migrate them to their new home.

  1. In Zerto, select the VPG that contains the VM(s) you want to test in Azure (use the checkbox) and click the Test button.

    Select VPG, click Test
  2. Validate the VPG is still selected, and click Next.

    Validate VPG, click Next
  3. The latest checkpoint should already be selected for you. Click Next

    Verify Checkpoint, click Next
  4. Click Start Failover Test.

    Start Failover Test

After you click Start Failover Test, the testing operation will start. Once the VM is up in Azure, you can try pinging it. If it doesn’t ping the first time, reboot it, as the Integration Services may require a reboot before you can RDP to it (I had to reboot my test machine).

When you’re done testing, click the stop button in Zerto to stop the Failover Test, and wait for it to complete. At this point, if everything looks good, you’re ready to plan your migration.

If you did anything different than what I had done, remember to document it and make it repeatable :).

Next Steps

Once you’ve validated that your systems will successfully come up you can then schedule your migration. When you perform the migration into Azure, I recommend using the Move Operation (see image below), as that will be the cleanest way to get the system over to Azure in an application-consistent state with no data loss, as opposed to seconds of data loss and a crash-consistent state that the failover test, or failover live operations will give you.

Note: Before you run the Move Operation, it will be beneficial to uninstall VMware Tools on the VM(s) that you are moving to Azure. It has been found that not doing so will not allow you to uninstall them once in Azure.



Move Operation


Recommendations before you migrate:

  • Document everything you do to make this work. (it may come in handy when you’re looking for others to help you out)
  • Be sure to test the migration beforehand using the Failover Test Operation.
  • Check your Commit settings in Zerto before you perform the Move Operation to ensure that you allow yourself enough time to test before committing the workload to Azure. Current versions of Zerto default the commit policy to 60 minutes, so should you need more time, increase the commit policy time to meet your needs.
  • Be sure to right-size your VMs before moving them to the cloud. If they are oversized, you could be paying way more in consumption than you need to with bigger instance sizes that you may not necessarily need.

That’s it! Pretty simple and straightforward. To be honest, obtaining a working copy of Windows Server 2003 R2 and the Hyper-V Integration Services took longer than getting through the actual process, which actually worked the first time I tried it.

If this works for you let me know by leaving a comment, and if you find this to be valuable information that others can benefit from, please socialize it!

Cheers!

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Zerto: Can Failover Live Be Used for a Datacenter Migration, Consolidation, or HW Refresh?

The answer is yes, if you really wanted to… however, there’s another feature of Zerto that will allow you to perform a much “cleaner” migration of your VM(s) with a more planned approach.

This feature may not be easily located, as it’s found within the Actions menu in the Zerto UI, but it’s actually a very valuable one that basically allows you to migrate VMs from one location to another (cluster to cluster, vCenter to vCenter, vSphere <> Hyper-V, On-Prem to Public Cloud, Site to Site – even from one vendor’s hardware to another) with no data loss.  That’s right, an RPO of ZERO.

Failover Live (FOL)

First off, since the title of this blog post mentions “Failover Live”, or as we abbreviate it as FOL, lets talk about that method first.  What is the FOL process, and how does it work?

The FOL process is an operation that should be used following a disaster to recover your protected VMs in a recovery site, or in the event the protected site ZVM is not available.  The main thing to note here is that when you execute a FOL, Zerto will default to the latest checkpoint, or you can select a previous checkpoint in time to recover to (usually within seconds of each other).  Additionally, you have the option to either leave the VMs in the group running, power them off, or force a shutdown.

Essentially what this means is that when using FOL, Zerto is expecting that there’s been an unplanned environment disruption of some sort and  you need to resume production as quickly as possible in your recovery site.

Here’s the workflow for a failover operation.  You can download a PDF version of this diagram here.

Zerto Virtual Replication Failover Live Workflow Diagram

Please note, that the workflow objects in yellow include some decisions you will need to make based on your type of disruption as it relates to the power state of the VMs in your protected site (Shutdown (gracefully), Leave Powered On, or Force Shutdown).

Regarding my earlier comment about ZERO data loss, this method will only get you to the latest checkpoint when the outage was detected, or a previous checkpoint.  You can choose what point in time to recover to, which in either option, will be a crash-consistent state which may not be desired for something like a migration project.

For additional detail about the Failover Live (FOL) process and how it works, including considerations, see the Zerto Virtual Manager Administration Guide for vSphere.

Move VPG

As opposed to an unplanned disruption to your environment, the “Move VPG” operation in Zerto is recommended when you’re performing a planned migration whether it be your DR site, public cloud, new hardware, or other datacenter.  The difference here is that when you perform a planned migration of your virtual machine(s) to a recovery site, Zerto assumes that both sites are up and healthy and that you are performing a relocation of the virtual machine(s) in a controlled/orderly fashion – with the expectation of no data loss.

Here is the workflow for a Move VPG operation.  You can download a PDF version of this diagram here.

Zerto Virtual Replication Move VPG Workflow Diagram

So as you can see from the workflow above, the steps are a bit different than a failover live, as there are actually some steps taken in the protected site before VMs are brought up in the recovery site to ensure that what is booted is in the exact same state as the source copy.

For additional detail about the Move VPG process and how it works, see the Zerto Virtual Manager Administration Guide for vSphere.

Summary

While you can still use the FOL process to migrate VMs from one location to another, there is still going to be some level of data loss and a crash consistent boot.

To ensure you don’t lose any data (even data that may be in memory at the time you perform a FOL), the “Move VPG” operation will take care of automating the safe/graceful shutdown of a VM and replicate any remaining data before powering up in the recovery site.

When performing either operation, be sure to verify your commit policy as well, because you would want to make sure that the recovered/migrated VM is in a usable state before committing it to the recovery location because once you commit the change, you must wait for promotion and reverse protection (delta sync) to take place before you can perform a failback.  Both options will allow you the ability to rollback without commit, but behave differently in terms of the expected state of the protected site.

 

 

 

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Zerto Automation with PowerShell and REST APIs

Zerto is simple to install and simple to use, but it gets better with automation!  While performing tasks within the UI can quickly become second nature, you can quickly find yourself spending a lot of time repeating the same tasks over and over again.  I get it, repetition builds memory, but it gets old.  As your environment grows, so does the amount of time it takes to do things manually.  Why do things manually when there are better ways to spend your time?

Zerto provides great documentation for automation via PowerShell and REST APIs, along with Zerto Cmdlets that you can download and install to add-on to  PowerShell to be able to do more from the CLI.  One of my favorite things is that the team has provided functional sample scripts that are pretty much ready to go; so you don’t have to develop them for common tasks, including:

  • Querying and Reporting
  • Automating Deployment
  • Automating VM Protection (including vRealize Orchestrator)
  • Bulk Edits to VPGs or even NIC settings, including Re-IP and PortGroup changes
  • Offsite Cloning

For automated failover testing, Zerto includes an Orchestrator for vSphere, which I will cover in a separate set of posts.

To get started with PowerShell and RESTful APIs, head over to the Technical Documentation section of My Zerto and download the Zerto PowerShell Cmdlets (requires MyZerto Login) and the following guides to get started, and stay tuned for future posts where I try these scripts out and offer a little insight to how to run them, and also learn how I’ve used them!

  • Rest APIs Online Help – Zerto Virtual Replication
    • The REST APIs provide a way to automate many DR related tasks without having to use the Zerto UI.
  • REST API Reference Guide – Zerto Virtual Replication
    • This guide will help you understand how to use the ZVR RESTful APIs.
  • REST API Reference Guide – Zerto Cloud Manager
    • This guide explains how to use the ZCM RESTful APIs.
  • PowerShell Cmdlets Guide – Zerto Virtual Replication
    • Installation and use guide for the ZVR Windows PowerShell cmdlets.
  • White Paper – Automating Zerto Virtual Replication with PowerShell and REST APIs
    • This document includes an overview of how to use ZVR REST APIs with PowerShell to automate your virtual infrastructure.  This is the document that also includes several functional scripts that take the hard work out of everyday tasks.

If you’ve automated ZVR using PowerShell or REST APIs, I’d like to hear how you’re using it and how it’s changed your overall BCDR strategy.

I myself am still getting started with automating ZVR, but am really excited to share my experiences, and hopefully, help others along the way!  In fact, I’ve already been working with bulk VRA deployment, so check back or follow me on twitter @EugeneJTorres for updates!

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Zerto: Dual NIC ZVM

Something I recently ran into with Zerto (and this can happen for anything else) was the dilemma of being able to protect remote sites that (doesn’t happen often) happen to have IP addresses that are identical in both the protected and recovery sites.  And no, this wasn’t planned for, it was just discovered during my Zerto deployment in what we’ll call the protected sites.

Luckily, our network team had provisioned two new networks that are isolated, and connected to these protected sites via MPLS.  Those two new networks do not have the ability to talk back to our existing enterprise network without firewalls getting involved, and this is by design since we are basically consolidating data centers while absorbing assets and virtual workloads from a recently acquired company.

When I originally installed the ZVM in my site (which we’ll call the recovery site), I had used IP addresses for the ZVM and VRAs that were part of our production network, and not the isolated network set aside for this consolidation.  Note: I installed the Zerto infrastructure in the recovery site ahead of time before discussions about the isolated networks was brought up.  So, because I needed to get this onto the isolated network in order to be able to replicate data from the protected sites to the recovery site, I set out to re-IP the ZVM, and re-IP the VRAs.  Before I could do that, I needed to provide justification for firewall exceptions in order for the ZVM in the recovery site to link to the vCenter, communicate with ESXi hosts for VRA deployment, and also to be able to authenticate the computer, users, service accounts in use on the ZVM.  Oh, and I also needed DNS and time services.

The network and security teams asked if they could NAT the traffic, and my answer was “no” because Zerto doesn’t support replication using NAT.  That was easy, and now the network team had to create firewall exceptions for the ports I needed.

Well,  as expected, they delivered what I needed.  To make a long story short, it all worked, and then about 12 hours before we were scheduled to perform our first VPG move, it all stopped working, and no one knew why.  At this point, it was getting really close to us pulling the plug on the migration the following day, but I was determined to get this going and prevent another delay in the project.

When looking for answers, I contacted my Zerto SE, reached out on twitter, and also contacted Zerto Support.  Well, at the time I was on the phone with support, we couldn’t do anything because communication to the resources I needed was not working.  We couldn’t perform a Zerto re-configure to re-connect to the vCenter, and at this point, I had about 24VPGs that were reporting they were in sync (lucky!), but ZVM to ZVM communication wasn’t working, and recovery site ZVM was not able to communicate with vCenter, so I wouldn’t have been able to perform the cutover.  So since support couldn’t help me out in that instance, I scoured the Zerto KB looking for an alternate way of configuring this where I could get the best of both worlds, and still be able to stay isolated as needed.

I eventually found this KB article that explained that not only is it supported, but it’s also considered a best practice in CSP or large environments to dual-NIC the ZVM to separate management from replication traffic.  I figured, I’m all out of ideas, and the back-and-forth with firewall admins wasn’t getting us anywhere; I might as well give this a go.  While the KB article offers the solution, it doesn’t tell you exactly how to do it, outside of adding a second vNIC to the ZVM.  There were some steps missing, which I figured out within a few minutes of completing the configuration.  Oh, and part of this required me to re-IP the original NIC back to the original IP I used, which was on our production network.  Doing this re-opened the lines of communication to vCenter, ESXi hosts, AD, DNS, SMTP, etc, etc… Now I had to focus on the vNIC that was to be used for all ZVM to ZVM as well as replication traffic.  In a few short minutes, I was able to get communication going the way I needed it, so the final thing I needed to do was re-configure Zerto to use the new vNIC for it’s replication-related activities.  I did that, and while I was able to re-establish the production network communications I needed, now I wasn’t able to access the remote sites (ZVM to ZVM) or access the recovery site VRAs.

It turns out, what I needed here were some static, persistent routes to the remote networks, configured to use the specific interface I created for it.

Here’s how:

The steps I took are below the image.  If the image is too small, consider downloading the PDF here.

zerto_dual_nic_diagram

 

On the ZVM:

  1. Power it down, add 2nd vNIC and set it’s network to the isolated network.  Set the primary vNIC to the production network.
  2. Power it on.  When it’s booted up, log in to Windows, and re-configure the IP address for the primary vNIC.  Reboot to make sure everything comes up successfully now that it is on the correct production network.
  3. After the reboot, edit the IP configuration of the second vNIC (the one on the isolated network).  DO NOT configure a default gateway for it.
  4. Open the Zerto Diagnostics Utility on the ZVM. You’ll find this by opening the start menu and looking for the Zerto Diagnostics Utility.  If you’re on Windows Server 2008 or 2012, you can search for it by clicking the start menu and starting to type “Zerto.”
    zerto_dual_nic_1_4
  5. Once the Zerto Diagnostics Utility loads, select “Reconfigure Zerto Virtual Manager” and click Next.
    zerto_dual_nic_1_5
  6. On the vCenter Server Connectivity screen, make any necessary changes you need to and click Next.  (Note: We’re only after changing the IP address the ZVM uses for replication and ZVM-to-ZVM communication, so in most cases, you can just click Next on this screen.)
  7. On the vCloud Director (vCD) Connectivity screen, make any necessary changes you need to and click Next. (Note: same note in step 6)
  8. On the Zerto Virtual Manager Site Details screen, make any necessary changes you need to  and click Next. (Note: same as note in step 6)
  9. On the Zerto Virtual Manager Communication screen, the only thing to change here is the “IP/Host Name Used by the Zerto User Interface.”  Change this to the IP Address of your vNIC on the isolated Network, then click Next.zerto_dual_nic_1_9
  10. Continue to accept any defaults on following screens, and after validation completes, click Finish, and your changes will be saved.
  11. Once the above step has completed, you will now need to add a persistent, static route to the Windows routing table.  This will tell the ZVM that for any traffic destined for the protected site(s), it will need to send that traffic over the vNIC that is configured for the isolated network.
  12. Use the following route statement from the Windows CLI to create those static routes:
    route ADD [Destination IP] MASK [SubnetMask] [LocalGatewayIP] IF [InterfaceNumberforIsolatedNetworkNIC] -p
    Example:>
    route ADD 192.168.100.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 10.10.10.1 IF 2 -p
    route ADD 102.168.200.0 MASK 255.255.255.0 10.10.10.1 IF 2 -p
    
    Note: To find out what the interface number is for your isolated network vNIC, run route print from the Windows CLI.  It will be listed at the top of what is returned.
    

 

zerto_dual_nic_1_10

Once you’ve configured your route(s), you can test by sending pings to remote site IP addresses that you would normally not be able to see.

After performing all of these steps, my ZVMs are now communicating without issue and replications are all taking place.  A huge difference from hours before when everything looked like it was broken.  The next day, we were able to successfully move our VPGs from protected sites to recovery sites without issue, and reverse protect (which we’re doing for now as a failback option until we can guarantee everything is working as expected).

If this is helpful or you have any questions/suggestions, please comment, and please share! Thanks for reading!

 

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SRM 6.1 POC Update – Post Failed PSC Remediation

Just an update here to show that after resolving that PSC synchronization issue in our environment, I am now able to successfully pair the two SRM sites in our POC.

Since I have replaced the failed PSC with a new one (new name/IP), and the SRM server was initially connected to the old PSC, I had to first modify the SRM installation and update the PSC it was pointed at. Once I did that, site pairing was successful, and all those SSL and user/password errors I was getting went away.

srm_poc_update_post_pscfix

So, my advice if you run into the same issues as I did – is not to count other systems in the environment out, otherwise, you may be thrown for a loop and support would be no help.

If we hadn’t discovered that synchronization issue between external PSCs, this would have likely been an ongoing issue and it would have seemed like there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

For a recap of the issues seen with site pairing due to the PSC synchronization being broken, see this blog entry.

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