HPE Zerto Software Reviews

The primary use case for Zerto in my company is to manage disaster recovery.

My organization has experienced the benefits of using the tool, which include the ability to test our disaster recovery quickly.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the constant synchronization, ensuring that we have the most up-to-date information should a disaster occur and we need to handle failovers.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is why we first acquired the product.

Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs is such that it improves them significantly, and it is the reason why we purchased the product. Rather than having to recover from backup, which is time-consuming, it is available instantly.

If I compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions, Zerto is at least five times faster than other products.

It turns out that my organization has not been using all the capabilities of Zerto and we just found from the session, HPE Discover'24, that the things we were looking for already existed within Zerto. I don't have anything to ask for improvement in Zerto.

I don't want any additional features in the product as I would be busy employing the functionalities I recently found out are available in the solution.

I have been using Zerto for seven years.

The tool is very stable.

The scalability is fine for our company. We are a relatively small organization, but it has done everything we needed.

The solution's technical support has been solid and very good, and we hope it stays that way under HPE.

In our company, we would recover from our backup software, so things depended on whatever backup tool was used at the time.

When it comes to the product's initial setup phase, Zerto's support has been very strong and relatively straightforward.

I have experienced a return on investment from the use of Zerto. The exercises associated with disaster recovery are faster and we are able to save time now in our company.

Fortunately, the tool's pricing and licensing are not a concern for me at the moment. Other teams handle it.

The evaluation of other solutions against Zerto was pretty quick. In our company, after we saw a Zerto in use, we couldn't find anything else like it in the market.

I have used Zerto to protect VMs in our company's environment.

Considering that there is always someplace to go from where our company is currently, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

We are using Zerto for disaster recovery. By implementing Zerto, we wanted fast recovery time.

It helps to meet recovery point objectives. Management is simplified. Its automation capabilities simplify the management of the disaster recovery processes.

It reduces the burden on the IT staff. It is also cost-effective. We could realize its benefits only in eight months.

Disaster recovery through the cloud is very important for our organization. We want to ensure that we are able to retrieve data in a proper manner.

Zerto helps to protect VMs in our environment. It replicates a lot quicker than what we were using previously. There is a reduction in the time taken to replicate. It takes a quarter of the time and protects our VM environment.

Zerto has been very good for our RPOs. It has been within seconds for us. It has also helped us to meet our RTOs.

It is easy to migrate data. We have not had any challenges. Zerto provides the ability to keep our users collaborating with one another during a data migration. It is very useful for a smooth migration process. 

Zerto helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. It saved three to four hours. 

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. Instead of ten people, we now have seven people.

It is cost-effective and stable. It protects virtual machines, and there is a fast recovery time.

It works well. It is simple to set up. It works a lot quicker than what we were using previously. It takes about a quarter of the time. It is important for our organization.

One thing I would like to see in their roadmap is introducing long-term storage in the cloud such as Azure or AWS. They can make it more seamless.

The downtime features can also be improved.

I have been using Zerto for one and a half years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It can scale based on the growth of the organization.

We have about 25 people using this solution. It is being used in multiple regions.

Their customer support is good. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We were using the disaster management solution of AWS. We switched to Zerto because of cost management and recovery point objectives. They were offering real-time replication and automation to help our organization achieve its RPOs and RTOs. We wanted better recovery time. 

Zerto is also easier to use than other solutions.

Its initial setup is good. Its implementation took one month.

It is easy to maintain.

We had support from Zerto.

We have definitely seen a return on investment.

It is cost-effective.

We did not evaluate other options.

I would recommend Zerto to others. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

The primary use case is disaster recovery. 

The biggest benefit is the application-consistent disaster recovery functionality. 

The most valuable features include the ease of use and the usability of the user interface. Long-term, the solution has proven to be very resilient and stable. It meets our DR needs for VM environments. 

The near-synchronous replication is a great feature. You have near real-time DR capabilities. In the years I've used it, we've had application-consistent profiles. To meet the recovery point and recovery time objectives, it helps to have that on hand. 

It's affected our RPOs positively. It totally meets them via near-synchronous replication. That means the VM stays in a consistent state and is always available. 

Zerto could improve its reporting capabilities. That's lacking. The alerting capabilities are lacking as well, partly due to the fact that there's no way to trim down the alert fatigue if there are failures within the application. It will send out alerts consistently instead of spreading the alert times every 30 minutes, hour, et cetera. 

We've been using Zerto at our organization over the past eight years. 

The solution is very stable. 

I cannot comment on scalability. We only have two Zerto instances installed, one in production and one in DR. We haven't had to scale out or to the cloud. 

We are protecting upwards of 100 virtual machines. 

Zerto's support is good. They are responsive from an email perspective. I've never had to pick up the phone to call them for anything beyond our DR testing every year. In those cases, we do open a proactive ticket in the case that we run into issues with recovering virtual machines. 

Positive

We did not use any other solution previously. We chose Zerto since it was an application we inherited. It wasn't something I specifically chose, however, understanding the industry, we know that it is the top player in terms of software recoverability for virtual machines. 

I did not initially set up the solution; I inherited it. However, over the past eight years, we have gone through a number of upgrades, which for the most part have gone seamlessly. We did have a few issues in the past that support was able to fix in a timely fashion. 

I'm unsure if the company has witnessed any ROI. We have not gone through any TCO analysis. 

The licensing is outside of my purview. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. If the reporting and alerting functionality were better, I'd rate it ten out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery. 

We set up the environment and we're testing right now. We are able to do test recoveries and restalls. Once we have everything set up, we'll try a real failover test. 

The DR - Disaster Recovery - is the main selling point. We have a policy that requires us to have, in case our primary goes down, a failover for our production environment to another site. 

The near-synchronous replication is very good. You can set it to a second. It's important to our company. All of our applications are a part of our production. We need to have uptime. We have an SLA that meets uptime requirements and needs to stay up to maintain our company reputation.

We are also protecting our VMs. 

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. It's meeting our objectives.

The journal history is only up to 30 days. If it were longer, it would be better and I would have more flexibility.

I've been using the solution for a little over a year. 

The stability is great. It is running well. 

The scalability is not too bad. We upgraded our server and we were able to scale easily. We installed Zerto on our VMware with no problem. We have about 200 VMs and Zerto is protecting about just under 100 of them. 

Technical support is an area I'm not too keen about. My experience is 50/50. Level one support doesn't seem very knowledgeable and I don't get the answers I want. That can delay us sometimes. Hopefully, they will improve. 

Neutral

I was involved in the initial deployment. 

The process is not too bad. The process was pretty straightforward. 

The vendor provided implementation support. 

We have noted an ROI. Compared to others, overall, it made sense to choose Zerto.

They are not cheap. They are more expensive than others. However, they have great features.

We did test other solutions. The speed of recovery in comparison testing was great. That was the reason why we chose Zerto over our competitors. 

We looked at Veeam Orchestrator and Veeam is not as complete in terms of DR. 

The ease of use of Zerto and the interface are easier to understand and use.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. It's around version eight. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall. 

We use it for disaster recovery. We do disaster recovery in the cloud as well. We also do routine testing of the disaster recovery functionalities.

We do disaster recovery in the cloud. Having DR in the cloud is absolutely fundamental. Backups are great, and disaster recovery is quick. If something is down, with the click of a button, we would be able to spin up multiple assets. Zerto allows us to do that.

We primarily have Azure, but we also have some integration with AWS. We found it pretty seamless. There are a couple of pain points every now and then with setting up policies and getting things to work as expected, but their support is very helpful for any of the cases that we run into. Whether it is running against RTO or having issues with certain VMs and certain workloads, we have been able to work through these issues and get it functioning as expected.

Zerto has been very helpful for RPOs. It definitely keeps us at our target recovery point. It is definitely the most important toolset for us to meet the RPOs.

Zerto definitely helps our engineers sleep better at night because we know that we can meet our RPO. We have an immediate button if we have to do a restore. Sometimes, we look in Zerto first rather than having to dig out of backup. That is probably Zerto's highest value-add.

It does near-synchronous replication. CDP has definitely come a long way. They were the first ones to do it, and they have definitely done it the best in my opinion. Other solutions that are out there are trying to emulate it, but in our stack, Zerto will always be the one on which we rely the most for continuous replication. For production workloads, this continuous replication is absolutely critical. We have a lot of SQL data and things that are constantly changing. It is sometimes a little bit of a struggle for Zerto to keep up with that much change rate, but with the tweaks that we have made, it has definitely been more possible. It is definitely something that is important to us, and for production apps, it is absolutely key. 

There are a lot of features. The UI is straightforward. It makes it very simple to group our resources and understand that our production workloads are covered because we can set them up as granular or as non-granular as we want. If we want to select an entire cluster, we can do that, or we can group it by application, which is the best practice and what we do as an organization.

The biggest pain points we have experienced are related to some of the SQL-intensive workloads just because the VPGs struggle a little bit to keep up. That might be because we are pushing too many transactions. That might be on us, but that would be my main suggestion. There might be a way to tweak the settings. There is an option to exclude scratch disks or temp disks in SQL, and that helps, but we still struggle a little bit with the databases with high transaction volume for the VPGs to keep up. We have done a little bit of work with the monitoring features that they have in the portal to identify whether ZVM or something else is overloaded and then allocate more resources to it, but there can be a little bit more transparency. If there is something they can do along those lines, that would be awesome.

Deployment is an area that can be improved a little bit. Sometimes deploying new ZVMs and things can be a little confusing. Also, with the supportability matrix, there is a little bit of a gray area sometimes as to which version is supported. There is some opportunity there to improve transparency around versioning and what to use moving forward for all workloads.

I have been using Zerto for about five years between multiple organizations.

It is very stable. We have no issues. We do not have to worry that Zerto will go down. We shifted most of our on-prem into Azure, and it works flawlessly.

It is definitely scalable. It just works. We can add more VMs. We can add more ZVMs to scale with the business needs.

We are using it mostly for the production workloads. We have a couple thousand VMs.

I would rate them a nine out of ten. It is hard to get a ten out of ten. There is always more that you can do with support, but they are always very responsive. They helped us through multiple issues with different VPG replications. We have had some issues there, and they were always very good at guidance. They always have a solution and a lot of good documentation as well to reference before opening a case. That is helpful. 

Positive

I have only used Zerto in the past. That is the one I am the most familiar with and comfortable with. I can compare it to other backup tool sets that I have used in the past, but I know Zerto is not exactly a backup solution. 

Its UI is very simple. I always find what I am looking for relatively easily. As they have evolved the web portal, it has only gotten better. The UI is definitely on point today.

I believe we have seen an ROI, but I do not know the exact number. We are definitely seeing a good return from what we have put into the Zerto product. Our business users said that it is very important to them to have disaster recovery and for us to be able to perform quarterly tests with all these different application stacks. We can show them what it is like to bring up a bubble environment and do full testing.

It was a little before I joined the company, so I cannot comment on the solutions they evaluated. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement. There could be a little bit more transparency around releases and what version to use. They have done some rebranding in the past such as ZRA and ZVM. There is some confusion there sometimes related to some of the internal terminology when you do not work on it every day, but overall, we are very happy with the product. It does what it is intended to do, and as a customer, that is all you can ask for.

We use it for failing over our production servers in the event of an emergency so that we have minimal downtime to continue business operations.

We only use it for failover to on-prem. We do not use it for the cloud.

Zerto was one of the first failover solutions that we implemented in the organization, so the benefits are pretty drastic. It is hard to compare it to any other solution out there because we do not have anything to baseline it on, but it certainly increases the confidence of our end users. We are able to react in the event there is an issue. The fact that we are not waiting for hours to restore operations is something that we find valuable.

We protect VMs in our environment with Zerto. We are very happy with the RPO results.

Its ease of use is most valuable. The online documentation is very clear and helpful. We are able to solve a lot of problems on our own without having to contact support.

We learned that we got a new account representative supporting our account. I found this out today. Apparently, this is something that they kicked off at the beginning of this year, but there has been a failure in communication in letting us know who is the proper channel for us to reach out to if we need assistance. 

While going from the major version 9 to 10, they introduced a new requirement for ECE Licensing, which is not something that we knew about at the time of our last renewal. We purchased it for a couple of years, and as far as we knew, we were in support. It was only when we were in the middle of the upgrade and had set up the entire environment and tried to put it up, it asked for a license key that we did not have. We were told by the support team to reach out to our account manager. She has been a bit slow to respond. It just seemed like lip service. The timing kind of worked out because there was a conference as early as that. They have been trying to fix it and communicating about it. I am hopeful it will be resolved, but I just cannot say for sure how soon or how fast they can remediate it.

I have been using Zerto for about two years.

It is stable.

We have not had any issues increasing the number of VMs being protected as long as we have licenses. We have over 100 VMs.

They are responsive, but when things need to be escalated, it is very unclear who is going to be the person to ensure that things are resolved. I would rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

I was not involved in its deployment.

It is hard to say, but the value is there. At the end of the day, the benefits of having a failover solution outweigh the cost.

I did not participate in the evaluation of other similar solutions.

Overall, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. We are interested in the technical abilities that it offers, but we would like to see an improvement on the support side.

I am a part of the disaster recovery team. We manage Zerto for our customers. We perform business-as-usual tasks such as installing Zerto or implementing Zerto for VMware infrastructure and if needed, for cloud infrastructure. We manage Zerto on a daily basis. We create the VPG, add virtual machines to the replication, operate Zerto to perform maintenance, and so on.

We use Zerto for live replication. It is real-time replication that takes around a couple of seconds. We don't use long-term retention or backup. We perform failover tests and live failovers as well.

Our customers are mostly satisfied with RPO, which only takes a couple of seconds. It does not cause big problems. It usually takes a couple of seconds. You do not have to perform any specific actions to keep it running because it mostly runs by itself and even resolves some of the issues itself. Zerto is very much related to VMware infrastructure. If VMware infrastructure is running fine, then Zerto runs fine as well. Zerto itself does not cause any problems.

I cannot compare it with others because we are mostly using Zerto, but we are very satisfied with it because within a couple of minutes, or even seconds, we are able to recover a VM or multiple VMs. Other recovery systems might work similarly.

Its ease of use is valuable. You do not have to do much to install Zerto or implement Zerto on the infrastructure. It is not very complicated. It does not have large requirements. There are mostly network requirements. It is required to be connected to two sites or more, and then you just install Zerto Virtual Manager. You also install virtual replicators on the ESXi host and perform replication of VMs.

I do not have any specific ideas right now. I know they moved to the appliance version with Zerto 10, but I do not have much experience with that because we are still using Zerto 9.5 and 9.7. The appliance will be faster and more secure. It will be good.

I do not need any additional features. The replication is real-time. We are very satisfied that this is happening all the time. We do not have to touch anything. When we implement it in a proper way, everything works fine. We just let it be.

I have been using Zerto for around two years as an engineer.

If the VMware infrastructure works fine, then Zerto works fine. I have only observed a couple of issues, but usually, Zerto Virtual Manager and VRAs work fine. They are not very problematic.

I do not have much experience with scalability. One of the customers has eight vCenter servers, and each one of them has Zerto implemented. They are all connected with each other, so sometimes replication goes to a couple of vCenters. Another customer has only two vCenters but with a large number of ESXi hosts in VMs. There are around 500 VMs that we have in production for one customer. 

I have contacted their support multiple times. They are quick to respond. They are happy to help. They are happy to connect by Zoom to have a session to share the screen. I am satisfied with them so far. I would rate them an eight out of ten because not every response is as we expect. They do resolve the issue, but sometimes customers have unusual questions, and they are not able to say how exactly to fix that or how to do something, but overall, it has been very good.

Positive

I have implemented Zerto from scratch on the infrastructure. In most cases, I am not configuring the network. There are other engineers to do that, but if the network is working and I have all the information I need, then installing Zerto Virtual Manager and Virtual Replication Appliances (VRAs) is very smooth and simple.

If everything is configured as it is supposed to be, it does not take long. It also depends on whether you need to deploy a Windows VM or appliance. If you need to deploy an appliance, it will take a little more time. Deploying a VM and installing Zerto Virtual Manager and VRAs takes a couple of hours.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room to improve, but I do not have anything specific that can be improved.

Our primary use case currently is for replicating virtual machines on a production site and for backups. We also use it for onsite cloning, and we have a license that enables us to do that.

We don't use Zerto in the cloud at the moment. 

The tool gave us a better way to respond to any problems on the production side and improved how we can recover. The recovery capability is the best part of Zerto.

The solution reduced our recovery time objective (RTO) and improved performance on the IO by around 10%. When we implement failovers and synchronization to VMs with databases, we see a marked increase in performance.         

The solution helped reduce our downtime. Before we implemented Zerto, my organization did a recovery that took four hours. Since implementing, the last time we did a recovery, it took one hour, so the solution makes recovery significantly faster. The cost of three hours of downtime to my company would be very high.   

The way we can use checkpoints from each VM to restore them is an excellent feature, and the replication is great.

Zerto is easy to use, and it saved us five times in three years; on those occasions, we had problems with our VMs, and we used the product to roll back to a functional state or for failover, which resolved our issues. 

Regarding near-synchronous replication, Zerto is the best application we have right now. We could get another solution to do the same job, but from a design point of view, Zerto is an excellent tool for replication and synchronization, and we don't have a problem with it.

The IT could be better; we have sectioned areas and databases for iOS, Windows, and Linux. Because the solution is centralized, each computer has the VMs from every section running.

The solution is very expensive. 

I've been using Zerto for three years. 

Zerto is highly stable, and I rate it ten out of ten for stability. 

We didn't have to scale the solution, so I can't speak to the scalability. 

I give the technical support full marks; it's simple to open a case and get a quick response from the support staff. We rarely experience issues requiring us to contact support as it is.

Positive

We didn't previously use another solution of this kind. 

The initial setup was straightforward; it wasn't complex at all. It was very simple to install and set up the replication, more so than other solutions. 

The replication functionality is very user-friendly, so that was the easiest part. At the same time, the security aspect of the solution, integrating with our firewalls etc., was the most challenging element of the deployment.

We carried out the implementation via an in-house team. 

The cost is one of the only drawbacks of Zerto because it's very high, and the overall impact of the solution on our organization is relatively low. This is why we are trying to figure out if another product could fulfill the same role for cheaper.

We are currently evaluating Veeam, and how that would fit into our system, as many of our clients use it, so we wonder if it may be a better option for us.

I rate the solution ten out of ten. 

My advice to potential customers is to carefully determine the requirements for such a solution and how Zerto fulfills those. Some solutions do the same job for cheaper, so considering the price has to factor into the cost-benefit analysis.