Recovery Site Licensing

Zerto maintains a replica of the virtual machine data and a journal of the data being changed within the time frame specified in the recovery site. No virtual machine is registered or powered-on in the inventory until a failover, move, or test operation is initiated. From a licensing perspective, a Zerto replica virtual machine is a cold offline backup, but this does not mean the recovery site hypervisor host should not be licensed.

If a failover test is performed, the Oracle database VM is running in the recovery site host and by the basic tenet of the OLSA, this requires the processors to be licensed. As Zerto recommends regular failover testing to ensure a successful recovery from disaster, Zerto also recommends licensing one recovery site hypervisor host. Zerto should be configured to replicate only the Oracle VMs to the licensed hypervisor host. It is possible to change the target host in the Zerto Virtual Manager to continue replication during hypervisor host maintenance without invalidating Oracle licensing, but a failover, move, or test operation should not be performed until the replication target has been changed back to the Oracle licensed hypervisor host.

Virtual machines being tested for failover by Zerto cannot be vMotioned between hosts in a recovery site and therefore it is not required to license all the hosts in the recovery site hypervisor cluster. Neither is it required to maintain a separate cluster for Oracle VMs in a recovery scenario.

If a Zerto failover or move operation is performed, HA and DRS rules should be applied to the failover virtual machine to ensure that the virtual machine only runs on licensed hosts in the recovery site. This can be done manually or as part of a post- failover script on the VPG.

If an Oracle database VM is never failed over, migrated, or run in a test failover operation, the recovery site hypervisor does not need to be licensed. However, Zerto recommends licensing one hypervisor host in the recovery site to enable testing, moving, and failing over the Oracle database virtual machines.