Zerto Virtual Replication 5.0 Features – Azure

By now, you are hopefully pretty excited about the upcoming Zerto Virtual Replication (ZVR) 5.0 release. For a quick refresher, checkout Josh’s “DRaaS to Azure” section in this VMworld announcement from a few weeks ago, meaning ZVR 5.0 will support Microsoft Azure as a target platform.

Before we expand on this topic, the main points from that blog were:

• A Zerto Cloud Appliance (ZCA) running in an Azure Windows D3 v2 VM is used to store the replica data in a storage account.
• ZVR 5.0 creates the recovery VMs on the fly 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.

ZVR 5.0 is the only solution that supports replication to Azure with the enterprise-class features required for scalable DR. Both VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments are supported for replication to Azure. Also, with ZVR being storage-agnostic, you have complete freedom from hypervisor or hardware lock-in.

Getting Started

First, deploy a Windows D3 version 2 virtual machine into Azure in order to install the Zerto Cloud Appliance (ZCA) software. ZCA will handle all the replication and recovery orchestration within Azure.

Second, ensure a connection to Azure is pre-established. This can be done using a VPN gateway, virtual network, or ExpressRoute in order to connect the on premise ZVR and Zerto Virtual Replication Appliances (VRA) to the Azure ZCA.

Lastly, connect your sites and configure your virtual protection groups!

What Happens with my VMs and Data in Azure?

Data in the virtual machine replica disks is replicated and stored into a Storage Account and are stored as single page blobs. Journal volumes are stored in multiple 16MG block blobs, which are cheaper than page blobs. Note that a maximum disk size supported within a page blob is 1TB.

Azure Resource Groups are created for each VPG upon recovery, and recovery settings can be configured such as virtual network on the recovered virtual machine, subnet, instance family, instance size, network security group, and private IP address. Recovered virtual machines use standard (versus premium) disks in Azure.

Is it Truly This Fast?

Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) in minutes are achieved due to the intimate relationship between Zerto and Microsoft developers to ensure exposure to the proper APIs in order to quickly build VMs and connect those to the appropriate data disks. This relieves the ZCA of valuable resources and helps to deliver the enterprise class dependability that you’d expect from Zerto. Instant copies are created from the replicated blob disks, journal data is applied, and the virtual machine is created using the Create VM API.

This is all coming very soon, so get ready by signing up for the ZVR 5.0 beta while there may still be room! Stayed tuned in the coming weeks for featured articles on additional features and find out how ZVR 5.0 can help you achieve IT Resilience!!

About the Author

Harry is a Technology Evangelist at Zerto focusing on helping customers adopt Zerto’s enterprise class scalability and agility to organizations of all sizes and sectors, and even across clouds, hypervisors, and platforms. Prior to Zerto, Harry spent 5 years with VMware Professional Services as a Senior Consultant architecting and implementing private clouds and major datacenter migrations. Harry then spent another 3 years in VMware’s Technical Marketing focused on product integration and scalability. @HarrySiii