Zerto was one of presenters during Tech Field Day 11 (TFD11) in Boston. Its product is a Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR) solution for virtual environments - VMs replication between data centers. Joshua Stenhouse (Technology Evangelist) presented 3 different use cases of customers, showed demos and feature plans for Q4 2016. All of the video recordings are available at Tech Field Day.
Just for a quick reminder on Zerto main features:
- Cross Hypervisor Support - VMware <--> Hyper-V
- DRaaS to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
- Snapshots are not used
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) – seconds. (async replication available)
- Storage-agnostic - any storage supported by VMware/Hyper-V (including FC, FCoE, iSCSI, NAS, and DAS) is supported by Zerto
- Orchestration of DR workflows, including test, failover and failback of a single VM or VMs group
- Zerto can replicate source RDMs (Raw Device Mappings) to target VMDKs and source VMDKs to target RDMs
- Checkpoints every 5 seconds and on demand. VSS checkpoints available as well
- File-level restore
If you are not familiar with Zerto Architecture please follow my post here.
- DRaaS to Microsoft Azure - at first VMware/Hyper-V --> Azure
- Journal 1 month
- One to many replication: protect a vm to multi sites
- Mobile App - SaaS delivered app to view multi Zerto Virtual Managers (ZVMs) - monitoring only
Journal extended to 1 month
Current version of Zerto 4.5 supports Journal (compression available) max 14 days. It's not so bad, however 1 month will let us to use a local replica (to different datastore built on another storage array) as a good backup solution. We will able to restore quickly whole VMs or specific files from checkpoint done every 5 seconds (granular recovery was introduced in Zerto 4.5 and available only for Windows files and SQL, Exchange and Oracle). Journal can be useful e.g. in the fight against malicious software 🙂 as Joshua showed (use case 2).
One to many replication and one to many platforms
This is my (and customers) long awaited feature - to be able to configure one to many replication. The next version of Zerto will support three types of replica - local, remote or multi-remote. A VM can be added to max three VPGs. Unfortunately, still we will not able to configure the cascading replication e.g. Site A --> Site B --> Site C.
- Local and remote
- Local, DRC and Cloud
We will able to configure one to many platforms replication: VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V or Azure, Amazon AWS and Zerto Cloud Service Provider Network. e.g. we can configure replication from VMware environment to:
- local - VMware, different datastore
- remote - Microsoft Hyper-V
- cloud - Amazon AWS
Currently, there is a limitation during recover of VMs. If we add some VMs into a VPG, we have to failover all VMs in the VPG. Fortunately, the limitation will be solved in the next version of Zerto and we will able to recover individual VMs.
Zerto does a great job - simple, powerful tool to provide DR for virtual environments. I'm looking forward to testing the next version of product in my lab!