Zerto Virtual Replication updated to v4.5 – still leading the pack!

update June 2016 ### VMware has been updated with version 6.1 of vCenter Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication.  Zerto Replication still leads the comparison score, while both products show strong overall technical capabilities and customer interest in the market). An updated version of this topic can be found here “Zerto VR 6, SRM 8.1, WS2016 – who leads the Disaster Recovery race?“

### update end ###

Zerto recently made available version 4.5 of its disaster recovery solutions for VMware and Hyper-V environments and is leading the DR comparison at WhatMatrix, however VMware’s Site Recovery Manager DR is very close if we look at the WhatMatrix score. Microsoft is a little behind, but stay tuned for another update on the comparison that will include Microsoft Azure Site Recovery (used for orchestration and as a replication target). This will certainly improves Microsoft’s WhatMatrix score.

What’s New in 4.5 – Summary

For the complete list, see the ZVR 4.5 Release Notes

• Journal File Level Restore
  • restore a VM, database or a file from a Zerto protected Virtual Machine using any checkpoint in the journal 
  • simple operation – all is managed from the same HTML5 Web GUI that is used for all the other operations such as failover testing, failovers and migrations
• Compressed Journal
  • a small feature with high impact: in 4.5, the ZVR journal is compressed at the target site (saving money with less storage usage)
  • no delays in failover testing, live failovers or migrations: storage savings without paying for a decompression operation during your testing or failovers. Expect to need only about 10% for ZVR journal space now that it’s compressed!
• Security, Resiliency and API Options
  • Role Based Access Control
    • For customers using the Zerto Cloud Manager, Active Directory integrated Role Based Access Control (RBAC) has been added (previously only provided through vCenter)
  • S3 Server Side Encryption
    • For customers using AWS with ZVR, security improvement in version 4.5 have been added to include S3 Encryption
  • Enhancements for Feature Resiliency
    • change the Zerto replication from an offline host to another target host in a cluster through the user interface.
    • reduced steps required to restore to a checkpoint that is during the time of an extended network outage that extends past the SLA of the journal.
    • adding vms to an existing VPG with 4.5 retains previous “points in time” in the journal and factors in the new VM into all the new checkpoints being written
  • APIs – Added API calls:
    • Create VPGs
    • Edit VPGs
    • Add/Remove VMs
    • Set replication and recovery configuration
    • Configure VMs, NICs, Volumes and other parameters of VMs in VPGs
      Note: In this version, vCD is not yet supported as well as backup, setting target volume as preseed or RDM disk management.

See a complete overview in the Zerto 4.5 DataSheet and don’t forget to check out the updated comparison HERE and an updated article here.