Zerto has released another update to their product – Zerto Virtual Replication 3.1. This new release further improves Zerto's capability to protect workflows across remote sites and enhances the capability of Zerto's Cloud Manager (ZCM), which is basically a dashboard allowing to manage multiple data center's protection from single console. Zerto Virtual Replication 3.1 release brings also additional new features.
Zerto Virtual replication (ZVR) uses different technology than VMware vSphere replication (VR). Zerto does not uses snapshots and CDP. Instead Zerto's appliance, installed directly inside the virtual infrastructure, is called VRA – “Virtual replication appliance”. The VRA is able to tap into a virtual machine’s IO stream causing no overhead or performance problems. The VRA uses the vSphere APIs to see the data flowing from the VM each time there is a read or write operation. Therefore, each time the virtual machine writes to its virtual disks, the write command is captured, cloned, and sent to the recovery site.
Zerto 3.1 New Features
The ZCM is used as a start point for deployments of Zerto across multiple remote sites and now the ZCM also includes each UI of each Zerto Virtual Manager. (ZVM).
Better Zerto virtual replication appliance (ZVR) management brings new view of VRA through a new TAB, which shows all virtual protection groups (VPGs), their replications, statistics and configuration. Additional new feature has been added to migrate incoming VRA workloads to other VRAs which enables host maintenance or load balancing.
- Zerto introduces simplified administration of BC/DR and protection of workloads within a Web based (HTML 5) console.
- Flexible Journal – allows recovery to multiple points in time. The size of the journal automatically adapts depending of how much data is exchanged, which eliminates overhead of checking the size of the journal. There is no gap in replication even when application generated a data burst. The decrease of size of the journal is slower which allows to make sure that it follows a long term of application behaviour.
Zerto self-service login portal – integrated in Zerto now. (Before it was a role of service provider to create the portal for client's access).- New Alerts and Events tab – allows to simplify management, with detailed alerts, which shows more details than before, where the details had to be viewed through log files only.
- Centralized Tasks view allowing to manage all running tasks.
Additional features of ZVR 3.1:
- Increased manageability of alerts and events with a new centralized tab for better cause/effect analysis
- Expanded REST API capabilities for orchestration, events and alerts
- Improved environment maintenance using new VRA tabs and workflows
Links:
- What's new in 3.1 PDF document
- Press Release
I had an occasion to review the Zerto product and I found it very robust and very intuitive and polished. You can read the article here – Zerto Virtual Replication Product Review. (Note that the product was in version 2.0 during that time).
You might also want to check the differences of replication technology used between Zerto and vSphere Replication (VR) products in this post – VMware vSphere Replication and Zerto Virtual Replication 2.0 – Products with different features and technologies.
