The Move Process
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- Last UpdatedFeb 11, 2024
Use the Move operation to migrate protected virtual machines from the protected (source) site to the recovery (target) site in a planned migration.
When you perform a planned migration of the virtual machines to the recovery site, Zerto assumes that both sites are healthy and that you planned to relocate the virtual machines in an orderly fashion without loss of data.
Note: To recover virtual machines on the recovery site during disaster recovery, see Managing Failover Live.
The MOVE operation has the following basic steps:
| • | Shutting down the protected virtual machines gracefully. This ensures data integrity. |
If the machines cannot be gracefully shut down, for example, when VMware Tools or Microsoft Integration Services is not available, you must manually shut down the machines before starting the Move operation or forcibly power off the virtual machines as part of the Move operation. If the machines cannot be gracefully shut down automatically and are not shut down manually and the Move operation does not forcibly power them off, the Move operation stops and Zerto rolls back the virtual machines to their original status.
| • | Inserting a clean checkpoint. This avoids potential data loss since the virtual machines are not on and the new checkpoint is created after all I/Os have been written to disk. |
| • | Transferring all the latest changes that are still in the queue to the recovery site, including the new checkpoint. |
| • | Creating the virtual machines in the recovery site and attaching each virtual machine to its relevant virtual disks, based on the last checkpoint. |
| • | Preventing automatically moving virtual machines to other hosts: Setting HA to prevent DRS. This prevents automatic vMotioning of the affected virtual machines during the Move operation. |
| • | Powering on the virtual machines making them available to the user. If applicable, the boot order defined in the VPG settings is used to power on the machines. |
Note: If the virtual machines do not power on, the process continues and the virtual machines must be powered on manually. The virtual machines cannot be powered on automatically in a number of situations, such as when there are not enough resources in the resource pool, or the required MAC address is part of a reserved range, or there is a MAC address conflict or IP conflict, for example, if a clone was previously created with the MAC or IP address.
| • | Committing the Move operation. The default is to automatically commit the Move operation without testing. However, you can also run basic tests on the machines to ensure their validity to the clean checkpoint. Depending on the commit/rollback policy that you specified for the operation, the operation is committed, finalizing the move, or rolled back, aborting the operation. |
| • | Removing the protected virtual machines from the inventory. |
| • | Promoting the data from the journal to the machines. The machines can be used during the promotion and Zerto ensures that the user sees the latest image, even if this image, in part, includes data from the journal. |
Note: Virtual machines cannot be moved to another host during promotion. If the host is rebooted during promotion, make sure that the VRA on the host is running and communicating with the Zerto Virtual Manager before starting up the recovered virtual machines.
| • | If reverse replication is specified, the virtual disks used by the virtual machines in the protected site are used for the reverse protection. A Delta Sync is performed to make sure that the two copies, the new recovery site disks and the original protected site disks, are consistent. |
If reverse replication is not specified, the VPG definition is saved but the state is Needs configuration and the virtual disks used by the virtual machines in the protected site are deleted. Thus, in the future if reverse protection is required, the original virtual disks are not available and an initial synchronization is required.
Note: A move differs from a failover in that with a move you cannot select a checkpoint to restore the virtual machine to. Also, to ensure complete data integrity, the protected virtual machines are powered off completely and a final checkpoint created so that there is no data loss before the move is implemented.