We are getting a project to set up a DR solution to a customer. The customer wants to use Zerto to replicate all VMware VMs to Azure.
I was reading and to set up this, it looks like we need to set up first the Azure VMware Solution. Ready Microsoft articles it looks like we need to add 3 nodes..it is almost 19k cost a month. .that’s crazy right?
It is any other way to set up DR solution in a VMware environment with Zerto to Azure?
You don’t have to have VMware running in Azure, you can deploy Zerto Cloud Appliance in Azure which is essentially a VM running Zerto that handles everything. This is paired with your VMware site ZVM and when you perform a failover the VMs are bought up as Hyper-V VMs in Azure. The main running costs will be the Zerto VM, storage used for replication and any transaction costs.
At Tony said, it’s not as complicated as you made it sound. We use this setup. Basically you deploy a ZVM on prem which manages your VMware side, it deploys these little VRA appliances to each host where VMware VMs are running, they are the ones that actually send data to the ZCA in Azure, which is basically a VM in Azure. That ZCA in Azure spins up own resource groups and a scale set for replication, with a few linux helper appliances that do the processing for replication and failover testing/actual failover. In our environment we are protecting 85 machines and it’s all handled by 2x ZCAs in Azure + 2 resource groups and 2 azure storage accounts. It’s hard to say how much it will cost, but it won’t be anywhere near as expensive as you assumed.
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