Zerto Virtual Replication: What's New in 5.0 | Zerto
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Zerto Virtual Replication: What’s New in 5.0

September 13, 2016
Company & Events
Zerto Solution

At VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas we announced the next version of Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR), 5.0, and I couldn’t be more excited!

With the new features coming in 5.0, Zerto is taking disaster recovery to the next level of awesomeness which any VMware admin would be crazy to not have in their environment. Why do I say this? Well, when you can replicate and recover files and VMs simultaneously both locally and remote, between different vSphere versions, vSphere to Hyper-V, from any storage to any storage, to AWS and now Azure all with RPOs in seconds, RTOs in minutes, consistency groupings, any point in time recovery with no snapshots, it really is a game changer.

So what are these new features that change the game of which BC/DR technology you should pick?

DRaaS to Azure

Building on the continuing trend of businesses looking to utilize the cloud as a disaster recovery site, ZVR 5.0 will support Microsoft Azure as a target platform. A Zerto Cloud Appliance (ZCA) running in an Azure Windows D3 v2 VM is used to storing the replica data in a storage account. ZVR 5.0 only creates the recovery VMs upon initiation of a failover, test or migration from either Zerto interface. Replication from both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments is possible with RPOs in seconds, multi-VM consistent Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs) and fully automated RTOs in minutes. Wow!

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With support for DRaaS to Azure, ZVR 5.0 enables enterprise-class DR to the cloud with cost effective use of cloud economies of scale all while removing the significant overheads of having to manage and provision your own DR site altogether. What does this mean? Public cloud is now a viable DR target for your VMs and applications and with the One-To-Many feature you can test it without removing your local protection.

One-to-Many

One-to-Many replication allows the simultaneous replication of a VM within the same site and to multiple remote sites. This includes replication from, between and to VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments as well as DRaaS to AWS & Azure.

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This feature works by simply allowing a VM to be placed into multiple VPGs, each with their own journal retention and Service Level Agreement (SLA) settings for maximum flexibility. There is no impact to the performance of the protected VM or the RPO enabling a multitude of use cases:

  • Protect VMs within the local datacenter and to a recovery site simultaneously
  • Protect VMs to new datacenters during migrations
  • Utilize the cloud for longer retention and DR
  • Protect individual VMs locally to recover 1 VM from a remote multi-VM VPG
  • Protect multiple applications in 1 consistency group to a remote site for app boot ordering

What does this mean? It means you can now use Zerto to recover your files, VMs and applications directly to production from any point in time without the performance impact of snapshots. It means that in one flexible solution you now have the most powerful data protection and disaster recovery solution in the world.

Zerto Mobile

Lack of visibility of the status of replication and protect across multiple vCenters and management interfaces is a challenge many large organizations face.  ZVR 5.0 solves this issue by introducing a new SaaS delivered mobile app, enabling the ability to remotely view the status of multiple Zerto Virtual Managers (ZVMs), Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs) and any alerts of running tasks from anywhere at any time, using a mobile phone.

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The app will be available for both Android and iOS platforms.  All data is sent encrypted over the internet where it is stored in an encrypted cloud service and database back-end.  Access is controlled by MyZerto enabling the secure management of employees requiring access to the app.

This means that you can now install Zerto on your boss’s mobile phone and they can see anytime, anywhere just what an awesome job you did by recommending, buying and installing Zerto.

Extended Journaling

For businesses that require longer retention of data, in ZVR 5.0 point-in-time recovery the Journal will be extended up to 30 days in the past extending the maximum history from the previous 14-day setting.  When coupled with journaling compression and the new One-to-Many feature, each VM can have a different Journal history which can be configured on a per-VPG basis, enabling efficient usage of local storage or cheaper remote cloud storage.  With compression there is no change to the recommended Journal sizing of 7-10%.

This means that you can consider the use of Zerto to protect all of your VMs within a 1 month SLA, which for many customers means you can remove the complexity of 1 additional product from your suite of protection solutions.

 

At this point you may be asking when can I get this? ZVR 5.0 is planned for release in November 2016, but in the meantime you can apply to be part of our beta by going to: http://pages.zerto.com/zvr-5.0-beta-test.html

Thanks for reading and keep checking the blog for more updates and information on new 5.0 features.

Joshua