• This topic has 3 replies, 3 voices, and was last updated March 22, 2024 by Julian M.

Zerto VRAH behavior during live failover

  • Alex C
    November 15, 2023 08:12:32 PM

    I recently conducted a Live Failover for a customer with reverse replication enabled. This customer did not want to use production VMs, so we temporarily added VMs to Zerto in order to go through live failover process. These VMs were failed over with reverse protection enabled.

    A week later we failed the VMs back to the protected site. Reverse protection was NOT enabled, since these VMs no longer needed to be protected by Zerto. Days after the test, VRAH vms were still on the protected site.

    My questions are:

    1. Do VRAH vms ever get created on a protected site?
    2. If not, shouldn’t those VRAH vms get cleaned up after the live failover operation back to the protected site?
    3. Did reverse replication not being enabled have anything to do with this?
    Ron V
    November 21, 2023 01:59:23 PM

    Hi Alex,

     

    1. A VRA-H is created whenever a VRA detects that it needs one to overcome the VMware limitation of 60 disks per VM. They are just disk-boxes that hardly use any resources (CPU/MEM).
    2. If a VRA-H is not needed anymore, it will be deleted.
    3. VRA-H creation and deletion is at the discretion of the VRA. Its presence or  absence is fully transparent to any operations that are performed on VMs that are being protected by that VRA.

    Basically, just ignore any VRA-Hs you see as they don’t use resources and are transparent.

    Alex C
    November 21, 2023 09:03:24 PM

    Is it normal to see VRA-H’s on the protected site?

    Julian M
    March 22, 2024 06:01:52 AM

    No, VRA-H VMs are only present in the recovery site where replication is received and needs to be stored somewhere (on a VRA duh!).

    In production, your data is stored as vmdks on the production VMs. The VRAs in the protected site are only used for replicating data to the recovery site and thus there should be one VRA per host and each one will have 4 OS disks.

    If you find a VRA-H in the protected site then at some time the protected site was used as a recovery site maybe in a Failover Test. Or you may have one or more VMs replicating from your recovery site to your protected site that you are not aware of!

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