Today Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0 has been released. This is a solution providing a business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) in a virtual environment (Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware and Amazon AWS). Comparing to Zerto Virtual Replication 3.5, the architecture has not been changed but there are some new features:
- New User Interface (totally a new design) based on HTML5.
- Zerto Virtual Replication supports vSphere version 6 and vCloud Director versions 5.6.3 and 5.6.4.
- Microsoft Hyper-V support.
- Cross Hypervisor Support! - Microsoft Hyper-V --> VMware and vice-versa.
- DRaaS to Amazon Web Services (AWS).
- Some additional improvement such as scalability (VRA as 64bit VM with max 16GB of RAM and 1500 disks), Offsite Backup compression and VRA Security Enhancements.
Zerto Virtual Manager 4.0 - New User Interface
HTML 5 rulez! (why vSphere 6 Web Client does not support it 😉 ) In my opinion, a new dashboard (responsive) is well-designed and when I was testing Zerto 4.0 Virtual Replication during the beta phase, it was my pleasure to configure, re-configure and test! Comparing to Zerto 3.5....the difference is noticeable....
Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0: New User Interface
Zerto team added some wizards helping admins to create and understand Virtual Protection Group (VPG).
Zerto Virtual Replication: Microsoft Hyper-V Support
Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0 supports Microsoft Hyper-V with failover clustering and dynamic disks. Both Generation 1 and Generation 2 virtual machines are supported.
Zerto Virtual Replication: Cross Hypervisor Support
Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0 fully supports cross-replication and recovery between vSphere and SCVMM. Everybody agrees that this is a really useful feature. I have some customers with mixed virtual environments looking for a way to replicate/secure not only VMware environment but also Hyper-V. With Zerto 4.0, they could build sites containing mixed replicated virtual infrastructures.
Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0: Cross Hypervisor Support
I have done some tests in my lab and it worked pretty well.
Zerto Virtual Replication: DRaaS to AWS
Zerto supports protecting virtual machines in either a VMware vSphere or Microsoft SCVMM environment with recovery in Amazon Web Services (AWS). Recovered machines are available in EC2 while before recovery the VRA manages the data in an S3 bucket.
Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0: DRaaS to AWS
Conclusion
As I described above, Zerto Virtual Replication 4.0 provides some useful features and how it works exactly "in the field", we will find out after release of the first Zerto 4.0 update/patch 😉 If you use Zerto 3.x already, please follow my another post here to perform an upgrade. To install Zerto 4.0 please follow post here.
Useful links
There are some useful documents as follows:
- Upgrade Best Practices
- Best Practices When Protecting Virtual Machines Running MSCS
- Best Practices When Protecting Microsoft SQL Server
and more available here.