VPG Best Practice

Hi Jennifer – I’m not sure about Zerto best practices, but I’ve found what works best for me, in my environment, and am happy to share with you.

I always use a dedicated datastore at the remote site, to store both the replicated VM’s and the Journal data. I have many datastores that serve this purpose, but they are always dedicate for Zerto data only, no running VM’s or anything else on these datastores. It just makes for a neat and clean setup.

I store my VM’s and the Journal data for that VM, on the same datastore. Here is an example:

Datastore01: VM “ABC” and “DEF” replicate to this storage. The journal for “ABC” and “DEF” is stored on this same datastore.

I also thick provision my recovery volumes. That way I’m never at risk of over committing via the Zerto settings.

Journal history is all about 2 things, how far you want to be able to recover to, and how much storage you are willing to use. There is a direct correlation. For me, typically every VM gets a 3 day journal by default. I then extend the journal further out, for those VM’s that require it. Most my VM’s are between 3-7 days. I have 1 VM where I do go to the maximum 30 days. You’ll also want to set journal limits (unlimited can only get you into trouble). This plays into the same equation as each VM will have a different IO rate per day. Generally, I start at 50GB journal limit by default, and that covers almost all my VM’s. I have a few chatty ones though where I’ve had to scale that limit up, in order to meet my 3 day retention.

A lot of this is really situation and environment specific. You’ll need to choose what is best for your situation.

Hope that helps.