Zerto 8.0: IT Resilience Across Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments

Zerto released version 8.0 of its IT resilience platform, targeting disaster recovery, data protection, and workload mobility across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. The release is notable for introducing first-class Google Cloud support and expanding existing integrations with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and VMware.

Google Cloud Integration via Continuous Data Protection

The headline feature of Zerto 8.0 is support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP), delivered through Zerto’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology. Specifically, the integration targets Google Cloud’s VMware-as-a-Service offering, allowing organisations to protect and migrate native VMware workloads running on GCP without abandoning the VMware tooling they already use on-premises.

According to Zerto, the GCP integration supports the company’s headline recovery metrics — Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), and workload mobility — bringing them to VMware workloads hosted on Google Cloud.

Google Cloud’s director of partnerships, Manvinder Singh, commented on the launch:

“We’re excited to partner with Zerto and to integrate its capabilities in disaster recovery and backup with Google Cloud. Zerto’s expertise in supporting and securing VMware workloads in the cloud will be a benefit to organisations that are increasingly running mission-critical workloads on Google Cloud.”

Manvinder Singh, Director of Partnerships, Google Cloud

Expanded VMware Support: vVols and vCloud Director

Zerto 8.0 adds support for VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols), enabling storage policy-based management to coexist with Zerto’s data protection layer across both traditional storage and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). This is relevant to VMware environments where consistent storage policies are enforced at the VM level rather than the datastore level.

The release also expands the VMware vCloud Director (vCD) integration, adding a self-service recovery portal aimed at Managed Service Providers (MSPs). This gives MSP customers more autonomy when initiating recovery operations without needing direct access to the underlying infrastructure.

A VMware VP of marketing for HCI noted the significance of the vVols support:

“Zerto support for VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) helps our mutual customers protect their digital infrastructure. As an Advanced tier Technology Alliance Partner, Zerto is helping customers realise the unique VMware ability to offer consistent storage policy-based management across traditional storage and hyperconverged infrastructure.”

VMware VP Marketing, HCI BU

Microsoft Azure: Hyper-V Gen 2 VM Support and Failback Improvements

Zerto 8.0 deepens its Microsoft Azure integration with two significant additions:

• Hyper-V Gen 2 VM support: Organisations using UEFI-based virtual machines in on-premises Hyper-V environments can now use Azure as a disaster recovery target directly, without converting those VMs to legacy BIOS formats. This removes a common friction point for enterprises standardising on Gen 2 VMs.
• Incremental snapshots and failback across all regions: Zerto’s failback functionality, built on incremental snapshots of Azure managed disks, is now available across all Azure regions rather than a subset, broadening coverage for geographically distributed deployments.

AWS Storage Gateway as a Cloud Archive Target

On the AWS side, Zerto 8.0 introduces support for AWS Storage Gateway as a target site for cloud archive and data protection workloads. This allows organisations to route long-term retention data through Storage Gateway into AWS object or tape storage tiers, extending Zerto’s Virtual Protection Group (VPG) framework to archival use cases alongside live recovery scenarios.

New Data Protection and Operational Management Features

Beyond cloud integrations, Zerto 8.0 introduces several operational improvements:

• Single pane of glass reporting: A unified reporting view covers the status, performance, and capacity of all protected workloads managed through VPGs, reducing the need to correlate data from multiple consoles.
• Unified alert management: A prioritised alert view surfaces critical alerts with customisable notification settings, helping operations teams focus on events that require immediate action.
• Impact analysis: New capability allows teams to assess both protected and unprotected environments, whether on-premises or in the cloud, to understand exposure and prioritise protection efforts.
• Resource planning: A dedicated view surfaces unprotected VMs across the environment, giving teams a clear picture of gaps in their protection posture.
• Automated failover configuration: Zerto added automated OS configuration and automatic failback configuration to streamline failover and recovery workflows in public cloud environments, reducing manual steps during high-pressure recovery events.

Leadership Perspective

Zerto CEO Ziv Kedem framed the release in the context of the company’s long-term direction:

“With Zerto 8.0, our mission is to deliver IT resilience everywhere, by introducing a range of new and powerful features along with deeper integration with market-leading public cloud providers. We give customers the protection they want, wherever they need it. Zerto has been moving the dial on resilience for the past decade, and the ongoing development and wider integration of our platform shows the importance of technology leadership in an era where businesses can never stand still on data protection and recovery.”

Ziv Kedem, CEO, Zerto

Summary of Key Zerto 8.0 Changes

Zerto was subsequently acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in 2021. Readers researching current product versions and feature availability should consult the HPE Zerto documentation directly.

If you’ve been waiting to jump on the cloud-computing bandwagon and buy shares on the cheap in a time when hardly anything in the tech sector is oversold, I’ve got good news. A truly under-the-radar cloud-investing opportunity, VMware (NYSE:VMW) is trading at a discount right now and I’m fully expecting VMware stock to ride the cloud back up to its $200+ high-water mark.

Tech Investment and Acquisitions Make VMWare Stock Seriously Undervalued
Source: Sundry Photography / Shutterstock.com
This is a company in the hybrid cloud space, which people typically associate with IBM (NYSE:IBM). If VMware can make inroads and steal some of IBM’s market share, however, a new hybrid-cloud king might be crowned within the next year or two.

In other words, if you’ve never heard of this company, I have a feeling you’ll be hearing a whole lot about them pretty soon, and by then, the share price could be much higher.

Hybrid-cloud Services for Any Occasion

VMware isn’t a household name or an American institution like its more famous hybrid-cloud competitor, IBM. Nevertheless, VMware poses a serious threat to IBM in this niche as its hybrid-cloud offerings are robust and, I dare say, more comprehensive than IBM’s.

I don’t want to turn this into ad copy, but I’m really blown away by VMware’s full suite of hybrid-cloud services. Clients can mix and match from a veritable panoply of offerings in this department, including the public cloud platform VMware vCloud Air, the data-center virtualization platform VMware vSphere, the network virtualization platform VMware NSX, the storage-allocation solution VMware Virtual SAN, and more.

The company’s crown jewel of the service lineup, though, is the all-in-one synthesis of hybrid-cloud solutions known as VMware vRealize.

Billed as “The leading cloud management platform purpose-built for the hybrid cloud,” vRealize provides “a unified management experience” inclusive of both physical infrastructure and external clouds.

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I’ve written extensively on IBM before and honestly, I haven’t seen anything from them quite like what VMware has to offer in the hybrid-cloud space. It’s weird to think of a capital-rich firm like IBM playing catch-up with a relative upstart, but I suspect that VMware’s sheer ambition could drive some big clients to the newer (and frankly, bolder) company.

Acquisitions and Expansion

Besides the company’s impressive array of hybrid-cloud service offerings, another reason to consider VMware stock is the firm’s growth-oriented vision. This is backed up not through words as much as action, as VMware is quickly acquiring value-added companies in the tech space. We can begin with VMware’s $550 million buyout of 2-year-old native-cloud-solution provider Heptio.

As Enterprise Strategy Group’s senior analyst for cloud services and orchestration Edwin Yuen duly opined (and I concur), “Heptio’s strong enterprise portfolio and customer penetration makes it a very good fit for VMware’s Cloud Native team and certainly worthy of the price paid.”

Next up is VMware’s acquisition of Bitnami, a package application company with the capacity to deliver over 130 software packages in a multiplicity of formats. Circling back to the hybrid-cloud topic, the company explained that, “Bitnami will enable our customers to easily deploy application packages on any cloud — public or hybrid.”

Next up is a real headline grabber: VMware’s buyout of Pivotal Software, which carried a hefty $2.7 billion price tag. I feel it’s well worth the price as Pivotal is, if I may say so, pivotal in the cloud-native platform-provider space. Then, just a few weeks later, VMware declared its intention to acquire Nysana, a known leader in the area of AI-focused network-analytics software.

Sanjay Uppal, who serves as a VMware vice president and general manager, explained the added value of the latter acquisition, stating, “Nyansa is a proven solution that solves many of the shortcomings of today’s vendor-specific solutions… [The company] currently analyzes user network traffic from more than 20 million client devices across thousands of customer sites.”

The Takeaway on VMware Stock

Frankly, I’m surprised that VMware stock continues to trade at a price-to-earnings ratio of around 9.5 and remains well below its all-time high of slightly more than $200 per share.

Given the company’s potential for expansion – bolstered by a stellar product lineup and an ambitious but measured penchant for value-enhanced strategic acquisitions – there’s no time like the present to start a position in tomorrow’s hybrid-cloud dominator: not IBM, but VMware.

Overview

In early July 2019, VMware instructed users to watch for software patches covering 31 of its products affected by two vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel’s implementation of TCP Selective Acknowledgement (SACK). Left unpatched, these flaws could allow a remote attacker to trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition against affected systems.

Background: What Are the Linux SACK Vulnerabilities?

TCP Selective Acknowledgement (SACK) is a mechanism that allows a TCP receiver to inform the sender which segments have been received out of order, enabling more efficient retransmission. Netflix researchers discovered and disclosed two serious flaws in how the Linux kernel handles SACK packets:

• SACK Panic (CVE-2019-11477) — A specially crafted sequence of SACK packets could cause the Linux kernel to panic (crash), resulting in a denial of service. This vulnerability carries a CVSSv3 base score of 7.5 (High).
• SACK Excess Resource Usage (CVE-2019-11478) — Malformed SACK blocks could cause the kernel to fragment the TCP retransmission queue excessively, consuming disproportionate CPU and memory resources. This vulnerability carries a CVSSv3 base score of 5.3 (Medium).

Both vulnerabilities were originally found and responsibly disclosed by Netflix researchers, together with two additional Linux-specific bugs disclosed at the same time.

VMware’s Assessment and Advisory

VMware published a security advisory on July 2, 2019, collectively rating the vulnerabilities as Important in severity. The advisory warned:

“These issues may allow a malicious entity to execute a denial of service attack against affected products.”

VMware Security Advisory, July 2, 2019

Because a large portion of VMware’s product portfolio runs on Linux-based appliances and virtual machines, the attack surface was broad — spanning 31 distinct products.

Products with Patches or Workarounds Available (as of July 3, 2019)

As of approximately 11:30 a.m. ET on July 3, 2019, VMware had released patches for the following products:

• SD-WAN Edge by VeloCloud
• SD-WAN Gateway by VeloCloud
• SD-WAN Orchestrator by VeloCloud
• Unified Access Gateway
• vCenter Server Appliance

Workarounds (rather than full patches) were also made available for:

• Unified Access Gateway
• vCloud Director for Service Providers

Products with Patches Pending

At the time of reporting, the following 26 products were confirmed affected but awaiting patches:

• AppDefense
• Container Service Extension
• Enterprise PKS
• Horizon
• Horizon DaaS
• Hybrid Cloud Extension
• Identity Manager
• Integrated OpenStack
• NSX for vSphere
• NSX-T Data Center
• Pulse Console
• Skyline Collector
• vCloud Availability Appliance
• vCloud Director for Service Providers
• vCloud Usage Meter
• vRealize Automation
• vRealize Business for Cloud
• vRealize Code Stream
• vRealize Log Insight
• vRealize Network Insight
• vRealize Operations Manager
• vRealize Orchestrator Appliance
• vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager
• vSphere Data Protection
• vSphere Integrated Containers
• vSphere Replication

Recommended Actions for VMware Administrators

VMware administrators should take the following steps if they have not already applied fixes:

1. Check VMware’s Security Advisories page for the latest patch availability for each affected product. Patch timelines varied per product.
2. Apply available patches immediately for products where patches were released, prioritising internet-facing appliances.
3. Apply workarounds where full patches were not yet available. A common Linux-level workaround for SACK vulnerabilities is to disable SACK via the kernel parameter net.ipv4.tcp_sack=0, though this should only be applied after verifying VMware’s specific guidance for each product, as it may affect performance.
4. Monitor VMware’s advisory for updates as patches for pending products become available.
5. Restrict network access to management interfaces where possible, reducing the exposure of vulnerable appliances to untrusted networks.

Context: Industry-Wide Impact

The Linux SACK vulnerabilities affected any system running an unpatched Linux kernel, meaning the impact extended well beyond VMware. Major Linux distributions — including Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS, and SUSE — issued kernel updates around the same time. Cloud providers, hypervisor vendors, and network appliance manufacturers all issued their own advisories. The breadth of VMware’s affected product list reflects how widely Linux-based appliances are used across its portfolio.

This article is based on reporting from SC Magazine UK and VMware’s July 2019 security advisory. Administrators should consult the official VMware Security Advisories portal for current patch status, as all products listed above have since received updates or reached end-of-life.