Automate your Zerto Disaster Recovery solution with vCO

Today I show you how to automate your Zerto installation with the vCO. Or those which are not familiar with Zerto here a quote from the Zerto Website:

“What is Zerto?

Zerto provides enterprise-class business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions for virtualized infrastructure and cloud. [……]  Zerto Virtual Replication, is the industry’s first hypervisor-based replication solution for tier-one applications. Zerto Disaster Recovery solutions replace traditional array-based BCDR that was not built to deal with virtual environments.”

So for those which know the VMware Site Recovery Manager, Zerto is an alternative Product to the SRM.

For a customer Self Provisoning Portal I had to  automate the deployment of the virtual Machines within the Disaster Recovery Solution.  In my case this Automation must be archived with the VMware Orchestrator.

Zerto offers a limited documentation of the API which can be accessed with a REST API. The documentation can be found here: http://downloads.zerto.com/documentation_4acccec86a1e7cbf77f8e6bd3831c31c/3.1/Zerto%20Virtual%20Replication%20REST%20APIs%20Online%20Help/index.html

With this documentation I started my integration.

First thing what we need to do to integrate Zerto is to add the Zerto Hosts as REST Clients in the vCO Server. This integration is done over a vCO Workflow.

If have documented this before in another post (http://www.vcoportal.de/2014/02/automating-veeam-with-vco-and-the-restful-api/) so I will only point to the parameter which are needed.

For the configuration, you give a name, have to provide the URL to the ZVM Machine with the configured Port (the default port is 9669) and a Connection and Operation timeout. Please use for the connection a HTTPS connection. HTTP is possible but I had a lot of problems that the vCO run into timeouts.

We do not need a proxy Server.

As Authentication we use the “Basic” Authentication Type.

I used a “Shared Session” for the configuration but Single Sessions are also possible.

When you “Submit” the Workflow you will get a Certificate error.

Install the Certificate and go ahead.

After we have connected your Zerto REST Connection, we have to create our API connection. The initial request we must made is to make a call to the API. This call is done with a username and password for permissions to the vCenter Server. Here it is important, that the Username and the Password are for a User with permissions vCenter Server. The Zerto REST connection response includes an “x-zerto-session” header. The String in this Header is used for any future communication with the ZVM (Zerto Virtual Manager) and the vCenter Server. All other ways doesn’t function!

First thing we have to do is to create the initial request. For the request this URL is used: “https://zvm_ip:port/v1/“. I place this initial request in an own workflow. For the workflow we need some Attributes, Input and Output Variables.

In the Workflow we create a Script Element.

In this scripting element we include all Attributes and Inputs as Input and the Output element as Output for the Workflow.

Then we create our Script:

// we must use "dedicated" User Credentials. With the Provided Credentials we need Access to the VC!

var authParams = [sessionMode, authUserName, authPassword];

var authenticationObject = RESTAuthenticationManager.createAuthentication(RestAuthType, authParams);

// Create the Host Authentication

RestHost.authentication = authenticationObject;

//Create the Session

var CreateSession = RestHost.createRequest("POST", "/v1/session/Add", null).execute();

// Place the Response in a separate Variable to Access the Content

var SessionResponse = new Properties();

SessionResponse.put("statusCode", CreateSession.statusCode);

SessionResponse.put("headers", CreateSession.getAllHeaders());

if ( SessionResponse.statusCode == "200") {

System.log("Session successful created")

xZertoSessionKey = SessionResponse.headers.get("x-zerto-session")

}

else {

System.log("Session could not be established")

}

With this small script we establish our connection to the ZVM and extract the x-zerto-session key.

Know we create the next workflow. In my case the next Workflow I use the command “get peersites” to access the connections between both locations.  The command to do this is: “https://zvm_ip:port/v1/peersites” .  Also for this workflow we need some Inputs and Outputs.

Also here we create a scripting element within the workflow.

We use the created Input as Inputs and the Output as output with the Scriptable Task.  This Script is used with the workflow:

//Authenticate the request with the Zerto x-session-header
var CreateSession = RestHost.createRequest("GET", "/v1/peersites", null)

// Build up the Session Header information

CreateSession.setHeader("x-zerto-session", xZertoSessionKey);

// The Output of the Command is catch in a variable

getPeersitesOutput = CreateSession.execute();

System.log ("ContentString " + getPeersitesOutput.contentAsString);

As last point we have to build up a third Workflow witch put both before created workflow together.

The Input and Outputs are created from the need within the Workflow created before.

After you have finished everything you can execute the Workflow and see the Output of the command.

There are many more commands witch you can use to automate your Zerto installation. All commands are documented in the API Documents to which I pointed before.

So have fun and orchestrate the World 😉