Calling all Zerto customers, you need this new Rubrik feature!

Rubrik 4.1 is now GA and with it comes an exciting purpose-built integration for Zerto customers! Whether you’re using Zerto to replicate on-premises, for DRaaS, or even if you’re a Zerto CSP, you are going to love this feature and if you haven’t already switched your backups to Rubrik, then now is the time.

So, what is it? It’s a new Rubrik feature for automatically linking discovered VMs and it’s going to make your life so much easier the next time you failover and failback with Zerto:

In combination with the new ZVR 6.0 VM linking feature, where you can select to preserve the VM BIOS UUID, it allows Rubrik to:

• Automatically rediscover VMs on failback
• Resume protection with the original backup policy
• Preserve the snapshot history
• All with no user interaction whatsoever

Boom!

This means no more having to manually reconfigure protection, and losing backup history chains after a Zerto failback recreates the original VM.

Here is how I tested interoperability:

1. Protected 5 VMs with both Rubrik and Zerto in my production vCenter.
2. Failed over the 5 VMs to my DR site with Zerto with auto-commit 0, force VM shutdown and reverse protection selected.
3. Zerto powered down the source VM, detached the VMDKs, attached them to the VRA, then deletes the source VM from the inventory.
4. Rubrik moves the VMs into Unmanaged Objects as Relics to signify the VMs no longer exist in the vCenter, but the snapshot history is maintained (and the VMs can still be recovered).
5. Failed back the 5 VMs to production with Zerto, and it creates new VMs, but preserves/inserts the original BIOS UUID.
6. Rubrik scans the vCenter (every 30 minutes, can be forced), finds the 5 VMs, then automatically links them by finding a matching VM BIOS UUID and VM Name
7. Rubrik links the new VMs to the existing relics to preserve the backup chain and applies the original backup policy (SLA Domain).
   Note: Because Zerto created a new VM, CBT has been reset and Rubrik has to take a full backup. However, this will be deduplicated against the existing full to minimize the storage impact. Zerto could stop this behavior by removing/adding the VM from the inventory rather than deleting/creating, but without this, there is nothing any backup vendor leveraging CBT can do.

Thank you to Abdullah Reza on the amazing dev team at Rubrik for turning this round in less than a week. We originally planned only to link on VM Instance UUID for VM removal/registration use cases, but upon discovering this Zerto feature we were quickly able to add support for BIOS UUID too. Finally, big thanks to Zerto for releasing their equivalent of a much-needed feature.

Don’t backup, go forward.

Joshua