I’ve asked this question to the forum and my internal Zerto contacts on several occasions. As we know Zerto does a great job of protecting our virtual infrastructures. However per Zerto best practices we are not supposed to perform backups of ZVM’s nor can we protect ZVM’s in a VPG. I usually hear things like well you can backup some key files in the Zerto program directory structure to recover from. At this point I would suggest that periodic vCenter based cloning of the ZVM’s might be the best DR solution.
Does the most 6.0 release address Zerto resiliency in any fashion?
I’m not sure about the new v6.0 (although in reading through the release notes, I don’t see anything mentioned) but I can tell you I do backup my ZVM machines with Veeam. The backup works fine, although I’ve never had to do a restore. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work though. I figure, what’s the worst that can happen anyway? I restore the ZVM and it doesn’t work? Then I’m no worse off than not having backed it up at all. That’s my take on it anyway.
We’ve been operating under Zerto BP’s by not backing them up with our Avamar backup product which uses vCenter integrated snaps similar to how Veeam works. We could go with Windows OS client based backups from Avamar which removes the snapshot requirement and quiesing the VM’s. It just seems to me that Zerto should provide resiliency for a product that is protecting our environment. They frequently sell their product on the analogy of a malware outbreak and being able to quickly recover back to a point in time. What if your ZVM(s) have the malware?
I hope too that Zerto moves to a lightweight hardened appliance based ZVM architecture similar to PhotonOS that removes the swiss cheese WindowsOS from the equation.
Ron F.
