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NCD – Replicating your On-premises Virtual Environment to Navisite Cloud Director

← NCD – Replication
Navisite Cloud Director® (NCD) integrates with Zerto® Virtual Replication™ disaster recovery protection, enabling hypervisor (or virtual machine monitor)-based replication between your on-premises virtual environment (VE) and your NCD environment. The replication service works with both VMware® vCenter™ and vCloud Director® (VCD) virtual environments.

Zerto Virtual Replication allows you to automatically and continuously replicate application data and virtual machine (VM) images, as well as system configurations and dependencies, in order to facilitate disaster recovery.

Overview

Establishing the customer premises replication service requires the following steps:
  1. Request the Customer-to-NCD Replication service from within your NCD account. Specify details of network to be dedicated, along with a rough estimate of the storage quantity to be replicated to NCD. 

  2. Configure VPN connectivity between your NCD and on-premises VEs.

  3. Download the Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) installation software and register it to your on-premises VE. Install and configure Zerto components in your on-premises VE.

  4. Configure (and adjust at any time) your desired VE replication parameters using Zerto's user interface.
Your on-premises-to-NCD VE replication is enabled by pairing and VPN-connecting the following:
  • The Zerto components and replication network that Navisite establishes in NCD. 

  • The Zerto components and replication network that you establish in your on-premises VE.

Requesting the Customer-to-NCD Replication Service

To initiate the service request:
  1. In Navisite Cloud Director, click the Services heading in the navigation pane on the left side of the page. The Services page appears.

  2. Click to expand the Customer-to-NCD Replication section. Review the prerequisites necessary for the service.

  3. Click Request access for the vCloud to which you wish to replicate. The Request Customer-to-NCD Replication Access pop-up window appears.

  4. In the Request Customer-to-NCD Replication Access pop-up window, identify the following (this process is required once per vCloud only):

    • VPN vDC Network – An Internet-connected vDC network through which replication traffic will flow (via a VPN connection).

      Note: To avoid conflicts with existing IPs or network configurations, create a new network solely dedicated for use for the replication – not otherwise employed prior to or subsequent to this configuration. This must be an Org Network routed by your Org Edge Gateway; you will be connecting it via VPN to your on-premises VE.
  • Storage Needs – A rough estimate of how much storage you will be replicating to NCD. This does not need to be precise. 

Upon receiving your access request, Navisite configures the service in NCD, employing an unused IP in the network you provided:

  • Navisite provisions a Virtual Replication Appliance (VRA) linked to your specified vCloud.

  • The table in the Customer-to-NCD Replication section of the Services page displays the VPN vDC Network to indicate completion of the NCD portion of replication setup.

Configuring the VPN between NCD and On-premises VEs

Create VPN connectivity between your NCD and on-premises Edge Gateways. The VPN must provide access between your NCD and on-premises networks dedicated for use in Zerto replication.

Note: Refer to "Configuring VPNs Between On-Premise Networks and vDataCenters" for details.

Regarding required firewall rules that must be configured for the VPN:
  • Ports 9081-10000 must be open to your NCD Org Network.

  • Ports 4007, 4008, 9081 must be open to your on-premises Zerto Replication Network.

Downloading, Installing, and Configuring Zerto for the On-premises VE

VMware Installer

If you are using VMware, click here to download the ZVM package for your on-premises installation. The ZVM installation package is an approximately 370MB download file. Register the ZVM with your on-premises VMware vCenter and/or vCloud Director systems.

Microsoft Hyper-V Installer

If you are using Microsoft Hyper-V, click here to download the ZVM package for your on-premises installation. The ZVM installation package is an approximately 350MB download file.

Within your on-premises VE, complete the necessary Zerto installations, component configuration, and related networking tasks – refer to the following documents for details:
Below is a high level summary of these tasks:
  • Install ZVM ("...perform an express install...").

  • In the "Site Name" field, enter your Navisite Cloud Director Organization name. This helps to  identify the replication site for alerting purposes, and differentiate between other replication customer sites.




  • Perform the initial configuration. Register the ZVM with your on-premises VMware vCloud and/or vCloud Director systems. The ZVM installation requests either a license key or connection to a cloud service provider; select Start by pairing to a site with a license, and specify the IP address of your NCD replication network (the IP address of the Zerto Cloud Connector, or ZCC). This enables the use of the established NCD Zerto license.

  • In ZVM, access Zerto's How To Guide (shown by default upon startup and also available ad hoc via a "gear" icon) for step-by-step instructions for installing VRAs and setting up replication protection through Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs):
  • Deploy VRAs (Virtual Replication Appliance) from ZVM – using the VRAs tab of the ZVM user interface, deploy VRAs onto each host that has VMs to be replicated.

  • Set up replication protection through VPGs as detailed below.

Configuring Replication Parameters with the Zerto UI

Once the NCD Zerto components, NCD-to-customer-premises VPN, and your on-premises Zerto components are in place, set up Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs) using the VPGs tab of the ZVM user interface. VPGs define the replication you wish to occur, and the desired replication intervals, specifying which elements of your on-premises VE are to be protected.

VPGs, test replication, moves, failover, etc. are created with the controls provided through the ZVM user interface. To access the Zerto Virtual Replication online documentation other than the How To Guide, right-click in the ZVM user interface and select Online Help. Zerto launches its help file in a separate browser tab.

Tip: The Zerto Online Help option does not appear from the right-click menu inside table row regions of the ZVM's tabbed user interface. Right-click on the tabs themselves to display the menu that includes the Online Help option.



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