Zerto Virtual Replication 6.0

vExpert, Zerto

This product review is off the back of the vRetreat experience back in February, for details of the vRetreat experience check out my previous post.

I personally have been using Zerto for some time, I was introduced to Zerto back in 2013 where we reviewed the product to conduct a very large Datacenter migration, and since 2013 I have installed and used Zerto for several large customer deployments, providing Datacenter and Application replication and resilience.

The latest version of Zerto (6.0) was released in February this year, this release is feature rich and has “Evolved Beyond DR” providing an IT Resilience Platform, this version is geared up to helping customers on their Digital journey to the cloud, this release of the software is built on 3 pillars to provide the following :-

  • Continuous Availability     – Delivering an always on customer experience.
  • Workload Mobility         – Migration and consolidations moving workloads at ease without risk, maintaining 100% protection.
  • Multi-Cloud Agility        – Leveraging Multi-Cloud agility to accelerate business growth providing the freedom to move between Clouds at ease.

With this release of the software Zerto have included the below features to enhance their product to enable multi–Cloud agility, this means that one product can be utlised to migrate workloads from on-premise to public cloud across various public cloud providers, like Azure, AWS and IBM Cloud.

Below I have expanded the six features that have been included in this release.

Any2Any Mobility, offers the below abilities

  • Replication and failback to On-Premise from Azure
  • Public cloud to public cloud Replication – Azure to Azure, AWS to azure
  • Intra-Cloud replication between Azure regions
  • Failover from Azure to Azure regions
  • Failback from AWS

The only drawbacks outlined are below ….

  • From AWS there is no one to many replication
  • AWS Replication is to S3 storage only – Zerto cannot be used to replicate to Glacier

Zerto Analytics, looks very impressive and offers the below features

  • Multi-Site, Multi Cloud Visibility
  • Network Analytics – Providing network performance analysis, with 30 days history providing
    • Throughput Max and Average
    • Can be leveraged for troubleshooting support issues and investigating bandwidth consumption
    • IOP’s History
  • Single Sign on, One user experience across all cloud providers

These added features are what will make Zerto different from its competitors and having used Zerto for some time I’m looking forward to reviewing these Analytics in a large production environment.


Journal File Level Recovery Architecture (JFLR), offers the below features

  • Rewind and recover from any point in time within the VM’s journal
  • Enhanced mount and download performance
  • New support for Linux
  • Zerto have removed the 2 TB file size limitations
  • Includes granular recovery, 5 second file recovery on checkpoints

Continued Scalability, Zerto have extended their support

  • 10,000 VM’s are now supported across each platform ZCM, VMware , Hyper-V

Remote Upgrades, offers the below features

  • Released a New Cloud Service Providers portal using Single sign on features
  • Remote Upgrade Manager
  • Zerto Cloud Service provider Compliance
  • Enabling Remote upgrades on customers deployments remotely
    • customer can block upgrades if necessary
  • Enhanced APIs bulk VRA upgrades, batch upgrades

Enhanced APIs, offers the below features

  • Enhanced integration with VMware cloud Director, including guest customization, leveraging vCD API support.
  • Enhanced API’s released for public usage

Added features and use cases that I will be investigating over the next few weeks are below: –

  • Ransomware use cases – for example you could store 4 hours journal locally then back off 30 days journal to the DR site
  • Preparation constraints on cloud migrations to public cloud – AWS drivers are required before migrating any workloads to AWS
    • From AWS there is no one to many options available
  • Analytics is progressing and additional features are been investigated to help predict trends
  • Product releases are every 6 months
  • 5 year roadmap – looking at containers, KVM, protection orchestration.

Thanks to Gijsbert for the platform overview and the additional information around the product life cycle, and as Zerto are stating “It’s not a product anymore it’s a platform……………….”


Download Zerto software from their website.

If you’re interested in learning more check out their website.