5 Benefits of Choosing Azure VMware Solution
and Zerto for Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery is a critical aspect of any organization’s IT infrastructure. Companies that experience unplanned downtime risk significant financial loss, loss of productivity, and damage to their reputation. To ensure business continuity, many organizations use disaster recovery solutions to protect their data and applications in the event of a disaster.

One such solution is the Azure VMware Solution (AVS), which provides an integrated environment for running VMware workloads on Azure.  AVS provides you the compute, networking, and storage to be able to supply you with a fully managed Disaster Recovery (DR) site. In addition to AVS, many clients elect to pursue Zerto in addition to AVS. Zerto is a leading replication technology for disaster recovery that simplifies management and reduces complexity in the configuration. In this blog, we will explore the value of combining AVS and Zerto as a disaster recovery environment for an on-premises data center.

What is Azure VMware Solution (AVS)?

Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is a fully managed service that enables organizations to run VMware workloads natively on Azure. With AVS, organizations can use their existing VMware tools and processes to manage and run their applications in Azure. AVS provides a consistent infrastructure across on-premises and cloud environments, making it easier to migrate workloads between the two.

What is Zerto?

Zerto is a leading replication technology for disaster recovery. Zerto replicates data and applications in real-time to a secondary site, enabling organizations to failover quickly in the event of a disaster. Zerto’s continuous data protection ensures that organizations can recover data to the point of failure, minimizing data loss and downtime.

Value of AVS and Zerto for Disaster Recovery

Combining AVS and Zerto provides several benefits as a disaster recovery environment for on-premises data centers:

  1. Simplified Disaster Recovery Configuration: AVS and Zerto simplify disaster recovery configuration by providing a familiar VMware environment in Azure that you enjoy in your data center today. Organizations can use the same VMware tools and processes they use on-premises to configure and manage their disaster recovery environment in Azure. Zerto provides an intuitive user interface to help you effectively monitor and manage your disaster recovery.
  2. Scalable Disaster Recovery Solution: AVS and Zerto provide a scalable disaster recovery solution that can accommodate the changing needs of an organization. Organizations can easily add or remove resources as needed to ensure that their disaster recovery environment meets their business requirements. Whether you need to add additional “nodes” or create multi-geo disaster recovery.  AVS and Zerto provide the flexibility to scale to meet your DR needs.
  3. Cost-Effective Disaster Recovery Solution: AVS and Zerto provide a cost-effective disaster recovery solution by leveraging the benefits of Azure’s Op-Ex model. Organizations can take advantage of significant cost savings with reserved instances on their AVS resources–  helping drive a cost-effective environment that is ready to perform when needed.
  4. Improved Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs): AVS and Zerto can help organizations improve their RPOs and RTOs by providing near-zero RPOs and fast failover times with journal-based replication as opposed to snapshot based. In the event of a disaster, organizations can quickly failover their workloads to their disaster recovery environment in Azure using Zerto’s one-click failover capability. This minimizes the downtime experienced by their applications and services.
  5. Regulatory Compliance: AVS and Zerto are both compliant with a wide range of industry standards and regulations, making it easier for organizations to maintain compliance in their disaster recovery environment. AVS and Zerto provide built-in security features to help organizations protect their data and applications in Azure.

How Do I Go About Getting AVS Set Up for Disaster Recovery?

When implementing Azure VMware Solution and Zerto, eGroup | Enabling Technologies offers professional services to help you implement the solution with speed and certainty. Some of the common pitfalls we help our clients overcome are ensuring we have a shared understanding of the Disaster Recovery need. Beyond that, clients often state the following are their largest challenges for implementing the solution – this is where eGroup | Enabling Technologies can help upskill and deliver success for your team.

  • Network(s) – complexity in site-to-site networking, bandwidth, and micro segmentation in AVS
  • Testing – developing and executing a proper disaster recovery testing plan
  • Cost – lack of clarity around reserved instances, network costs, and storage sizing
  • Compliance – ensuring the Microsoft Azure/AVS environment conforms to stated security and compliance standards

Incentives

eGroup | Enabling Technologies partners with Microsoft and VMware to provide an effective Disaster Recovery Proof of Concept leveraging trial AVS solutions, and Microsoft funded services for qualified customers. Reach out and learn more: 

Managed Services

Ensure your business is ready to recover when needed with effective 24×7 managed services for your Azure, Data Center, and DR replication.  Including change configuration, monitoring, and managed failover events to ensure your critical applications are up and running when you need them the most. 

Conclusion

Combining Azure VMware Solution (AVS) and Zerto as a disaster recovery environment for on-premises data centers provides a valuable solution that simplifies configuration, is scalable and cost-effective, improves RPOs and RTOs, and helps organizations maintain regulatory compliance. With AVS and Zerto, organizations can have peace of mind knowing that their critical applications and services are protected in the event of a disaster. With eGroup | Enabling Technologies, you can have confidence in knowing you have a team of experts available to implement, manage, and support your disaster recovery readiness.

Jason Webster

Jason Webster

Principal, Mid-Atlantic - eGroup | Enabling Technologies

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Last updated on July 24th, 2023 at 12:16 pm