Zerto announced support for Hyper-V platform. but their long term strategy is to create Zerto Cloud Fabric allowing to replicate VMs between different hypervizors (including the on-the-fly-conversion). The hyper-V announcement was scheduled exactly for TechEd Europe in Barcelona (just started yesterday) and will allow to protect critical workloads on this platform. The cloud fabric announce is pretty cool as previously I knew that company called Hotlink did have a similar approach. Zerto Virtual Replication for Hyper-V will allow very small RTOs and even smallest RPOs.
Zerto Virtual Replication for Hyper-V is logical step for Zerto as many companies from the purely VMware ecosystem now embrace Hyper-V as this platform starting to gain momentum. But Zerto can possibly solve one principal pain of today's admins which are managing or planning to manage mixed environments. Until now if you were only VMware shop you stayed VMware shop, or only Hyper-V. And there wasn't any tools or software allowing automated DR processes with seamless conversion of workloads and at the same time assuring VM and application dependency, between those two hypervizor's platforms.
As you know Zerto don't uses snapshot technology for replication, but rather continuous replication for data protection. Cloud fabric will not add another layer to the hypervizor platform but the process of conversion (from VMware to Hyper-V or vice versa) will happen within Zerto itself. Users wanting to protect their business critical applications with DR scenarios to a remote site until now did not have any choice but to stay with single hypervizor platform. Usually VMware. But now we can imagine having Free Hyper-V at the remote site to be ready just in case that the whole primary site goes down. All the orchestration and automation of DR process would be handled by Zerto.
On the road map as you can see, there is more hypervisors…
Zerto Cloud Fabric
- Application encapsulation – encapsulate workloads by grouping related virtual machines, including all the associated data, inter-dependency rules, boot order, networking and other settings
- Enterprise grade replication – continuous block level near-sync replication, with consistency grouping, WAN optimization and point-in-time recovery to ensure that complex multi-tier applications will recover without any downtime
- Automated Orchestration – single click automated creation of large scale applications and datasets with all their associated data and dependencies in different clouds to simplify disaster recovery, migrations and portability operations
- Infrastructure conversion – moving workloads between VMware, Hyper-V or AWS requires conversion of VMs and their attributes
- Data protection and business continuity workflows – to enable utilization of different infrastructures for backup and DR, Cloud Fabric must include backup and disaster recovery workflow enabling multi-site replication, backup and recovery
Here is a video which discusses Zerto Cloud Fabric and the possibilities:
Zerto Virtual Replication Technology
Zerto Virtual replication (ZVR) uses different technology than VMware vSphere replication (VR) or than Hyper-V replication. Zerto does not uses snapshots and CDP. Instead, Zerto’s appliance, installed directly inside the virtual infrastructure (as a VM) and it 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 (I imagine similar technology is used for Hyper-V) 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.
Source: Zerto
Download Zerto Trial from their website.
More from ESX Virtualization:
- VMware vCenter Server Standard vs Foundation – Differences
- vSphere 6.5
- VMware API Explorer Is a Free Built-in Utility in VCSA
- Free Tools
- What is VMware vSphere Update Manager?
- VMware vSphere Standard vs Enterprise Plus
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