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HPE Zerto Software vs Recovery Manager for Active Directory comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE Zerto Software
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
343
Ranking in other categories
Backup and Recovery (2nd), Cloud Migration (1st), Cloud Backup (3rd), Disaster Recovery (DR) Software (1st)
Recovery Manager for Active...
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
Active Directory Recovery (1st)
 

Featured Reviews

DR
Enterprise data management supervisor at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees
An all-in-one and cost-efficient solution that does what it promises
Zerto is very easy to use. Installation is about half an hour, and then it starts protecting the data and VMs. It is not very cumbersome. The UI is built very well. It is fairly self-explanatory. To be able to stand up a product you have never seen in half an hour and get it functioning and protecting speaks to how good the UI and workflow are. Zerto has near-synchronous replication. As a change is made on site A, it gets copied across the network to site B. We are five or six seconds behind production. If I have a heavily used system and I use traditional backups, I could be anywhere from 5 minutes to 23 hours behind. With Zerto, I am single-digit seconds behind. That works well for us. Our disaster recovery test, which used to span an entire week, now takes two days. We used to recover our servers in the first two or three days with a backup product and then test for two days before tearing it all down. Now, we spend half a day on new servers and ensuring things work with networking, etc. We test the next day, and we are done in two days. Across the entire company, we are able to save significant man-hours by shortening the test from a week to two days. We are now doing smaller tests once a month and larger tests once a year. Zerto has reduced our DR testing time by 60% to 70%. We are also able to do more disaster recovery testing. Previously, we were doing it once a year, whereas now, we are doing smaller tests once a month and our large tests once a year. In recovery point objectives, we are single-digit seconds behind. In terms of RTOs, I can recover 350 VMs in 30 minutes. It takes less than several seconds to restore a single VM. From days to 30 minutes for 350 compared to 100 VMs is an incredible time-saving in terms of RTOs and RPOs for us.
KF
Senior Operations Manager at Procter & Gamble
Offers zero-touch or zero-intervention aspects, stable and easy to setup
Inside the console, when you change something in the computer collection, there's no history or log showing what's been done. For example, if I add or remove a domain controller from the compare collection, the console doesn't record the time or the user who made the change. This makes it difficult to manage the console, especially for auditing purposes. It lacks login capability within Recovery Manager for Active Directory. This means if I delegate tasks to a level two or an interim level three technician, and they make a mistake, it's difficult to track. Ideally, I'd like to monitor who makes changes within the console to ensure proper management. Currently, that kind of capability isn't available.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Zerto is truly inspiring."
"It is way faster than just manually moving VMDKs, etc. It saves hours of time and a significant amount of money."
"Before Zerto, it would take us four days to recover. Now, we're looking at a couple of hours."
"I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten."
"I like the less than one-minute RPO, the ability to IP customize during failovers, and the cloning feature that I can use to clone VMs over at the target location. As part of the automation failover, if we need to change an IP when it fails over to the other data center, Zerto will handle that; there's no need for manual intervention. As far as the cloning, we use that to do quick testing of a VM in the remote data center for lift-and-shift processors."
"A new feature is the One-To-Many VPG allowing a VM to be replicated at up to three different locations, including local."
"We now have zero downtime using this product."
"We use the solution to move servers and VMs between data centers."
"The feature that automates most of the tasks is the most valuable since you do not have to worry about making sure that you follow the steps one by one manually during a disaster."
"Our impression of the solution for providing a clean, malware-free recovery and protecting our AD backups from compromise is that it is probably one of the best options available."
"I like the zero-touch or zero-intervention aspect the most when it comes to performing a forest restoration (FOHO). It is really automated. If you set everything correctly, it will restore your forest without any manual steps."
 

Cons

"When setting up Zerto, you have to set up VRAs. I would like to see those not be needed as much. They're a little cumbersome and take up a lot of VM counts."
"Our operational teams have discussed the ability to integrate multiple Zerto cloud platforms more seamlessly. For example, we have acquired 22 companies over the last seven years. Some already had it deployed, and integrating those existing deployments into our primary deployment is more challenging than it could be. We have provided our feedback to them."
"Migration of complex VMware and Hyper-V solution. Using Zerto to replicate to azure and S3."
"I have had problems with vRAs. When I am trying to restart a host, sometimes the vRAs will hang. I would like it if they wouldn't migrate off or shut themselves down, then I have to manually work with it a lot of the time."
"HPE Zerto Software could evolve to where, instead of me having to push a button, it can detect disasters on the fly and automate disaster detection."
"The HPE Zerto Software can be improved with more visibility. It's really hard to find out what stores and what drives I'm using, and then to translate that over to the cloud solution."
"I would like to see improvement on the Zerto Virtual Replication appliances, so that they are a little bit more streamlined as opposed to now where they just span multiple ZVR appliances like there were gremlins... as this thing grows it just spawns unlimited numbers of additional ZVR appliances and you end up with a bunch so that you can't really tell which is which."
"My experience deploying the HPE Zerto Software involves some initial setup hurdles."
"Inside the console, when you change something in the computer collection, there's no history or log showing what's been done. For example, if I add or remove a domain controller from the compare collection, the console doesn't record the time or the user who made the change. This makes it difficult to manage the console, especially for auditing purposes. It lacks login capability within Recovery Manager for Active Directory."
"One of the things they can do is give the user the ability to skip the prechecks and verifications."
"I identified a gap with their Recovery Manager for AD Forest Edition. That software can't recover for us if we have a complete malware/ransomware-type scenario where we lose all our domain controllers. If you lose the entire forest, you can't get it back up with the Forest Edition. You have to use their Disaster Recovery Edition."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Zerto is like a Ferrari. It's very fast but not the cheapest solution. You're paying a high price for quality and the assurance that you will have the environment up and steady."
"From a customer perspective, the price is okay. From an investor's perspective, however, it is a little bit high."
"Zerto's pricing model is cost-prohibitive for small—to medium-sized businesses."
"I do not have anything to compare it to. It is expensive, but I am not going to squabble about the price when I bring the system up in a disaster. It is what it is."
"It is an enterprise-grade product. When you buy enterprise-grade tools, you have to expect to pay a higher price. It goes back to the idea of you get what you pay for."
"Zerto previously had a perplexing licensing structure, but they have since resolved it by implementing a unified license."
"In general, it's pretty fair because it is software. In our case, we built our own colo. So, the cost of the colo was very expensive, and that's where a lot of the equipment is. The same thing is there if we were going to spin up in the cloud, but as a solution, in general, it's pretty fair for what you get out of it and how it works. It's not cheap, but at the same time, you get what you pay for, and it's definitely worth the cost. You just have to understand that the cost of the software alone is not the total cost of the project of doing ransomware protection or disaster recovery. It's a piece of the pie, not the entire pie."
"They should adjust the pricing because I feel its price is too much. If they reduce the price, there will be more users and customers."
"Comparing it to other vendors, it seems to be affordable. So, it is worth the money."
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Comparison Review

it_user159711 - PeerSpot reviewer
Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Nov 9, 2014
VMware SRM vs. Veeam vs. Zerto
Disaster recovery planning is something that seems challenging for all businesses. Virtualization in addition to its operational flexibility, and cost reduction benefits, has helped companies improve their DR posture. Virtualization has made it easier to move machines from production to…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business90
Midsize Enterprise86
Large Enterprise196
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What advice do you have for others considering Oracle Data Guard?
Ik fluister:VM Host Oracle en DataGuard hebben we per toeval vervangen door Zerto :-) tijdens de Zerto implementatie en VPG werden de Host Data in write-ack Block-Level gerepliceerd. Qua licentie 1...
What do you like most about Zerto?
Its ability to roll back if the VM or the server that you are recovering does not come up right is also valuable. You have the ability to roll back a few seconds or a few minutes. The rollback feat...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Zerto?
From a pricing perspective, HPE Zerto Software is expensive in comparison to other products on the market, but I think it is an easier sell because it works so well and it is so easy to set up a de...
What do you like most about Quest Recovery Manager for Active Directory?
I like the zero-touch or zero-intervention aspect the most when it comes to performing a forest restoration (FOHO). It is really automated. If you set everything correctly, it will restore your for...
What is your primary use case for Quest Recovery Manager for Active Directory?
We use Quest Recovery Manager for Active Directory to test disaster recovery, and we use it to restore objects as they get deleted by mistake or mistakes happen.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Quest Recovery Manager for Active Directory?
The pricing is in the middle. Comparing it to other vendors, it seems to be affordable. So, it is worth the money.
 

Also Known As

Zerto Virtual Replication
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

United Airlines, HCA, XPO Logistics, TaxSlayer, McKesson, Insight Global, American Airlines, Tencate, Aaron’s, Grey’s County, Kingston Technologies
American Airlines, Bank of America, Ebay, intel, Uber, at&t, Ford, Microsoft, Visa, Barclays, Mars, Merck
Find out what your peers are saying about Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Veeam Software, Commvault and others in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software. Updated: December 2025.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.