HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We offer Zerto to our application owners and system owners as a DR solution for them. It's part of our service offering from the VMware side because we do the infrastructure for them. We help orchestrate and set it up for them at the back end.

We also use Zerto to remove RDMs from the environment and help manage our storage. If we need to relocate the storage, we use Zerto, especially when going from multiple vCenters or multiple clusters. It's very convenient.

We can completely replicate a server so that when an issue arises we can be up and running with no downtime. Also, if we're doing a planned DR exercise, it works really well. It can be set up in advance so that there's zero downtime.

Using Zerto to get off of old storage has been more convenient than using VMotion.

The replication for DR is really good, and the test failover within the application is really solid, along with the ability to manipulate RDMs or remove them.

We are required to do DR testing for almost every application every two years. Zerto made it more convenient and significantly faster for us. Our job is a nice little 15 to 20 minute stint that anybody can do within our organization. I don't need a full-on engineer. I can have an operations person handle it.

Zerto has really great online training, and they gamified their training pretty well too.

When you compare Zerto's ease of use with that of SRM and Veritas, Zerto is really easy, especially when you're doing a DR exercise or a failover. It has evolved and is now even easier. With every iteration, they make the verbiage clearer, and people just gravitate to it. I can have someone from the operations team help with DR when Singapore's doing a DR exercise, for example. This helps a lot as a company with a global presence. The other solutions require a little bit more understanding of the technology. They are not as forgiving if you make a mistake.

The speed of recovery with Zerto is faster than that with SRM. Much more engineering management needs to go on after the fact with SRM.

Without Zerto, in the event of downtime, it could take hours to get back up and running. Some VMs could take eight to ten hours just to get to a point where they could accept a restore from a backup solution, if that solution is even available.

Zerto does a really good job with their packeting on the networking side, and I've never had a site experience an impact because Zerto was running a replication.

The only thing I really don't like about Zerto is that the ZVM has to be a Windows server. I can spin up any OBA template whenever I want to, but if it has an OS that's tied to it, then I have to involve the OS team from my company. That drives me crazy.

I've been using this solution for five years.

It's exceptionally reliable. I'd give it a ten out of ten. Any complication we've had has usually resulted from the Windows team patching that server or some other behavior.

Zerto scales really well. It scales out really wide, and you can tie it all into your primary site. You don't need central management.

We have around 900 hosts across the world globally. We have a little over 10,000 VMs and have mixed usage with lots of databases, applications, and web-based applications. We have about 27 primary vCenters and seven manufacturing vCenters.

Zerto's technical support takes really good advantage of the community. When you put in a service ticket, they redirect you to a message blog or message group. Then, you can use that to also vet what other people are saying, and you can use that as a great resource.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate technical support at ten.

We used SRM before we switched to Zerto, and Zerto is very cost-effective.

Zerto is very straightforward to set up. The only drawback is having to have the Window server.

After the Windows server is deployed, it takes less than an hour to deploy the solution.

Zerto does exactly what it says it's going to do. I don't have to go back and babysit it. If something happens, it alerts me. I don't have to sit there and add hours of babysitting or monitoring. I can be doing other tasks. That is our ROI.

Zerto is very cost-effective. We get really great value for the cost of the service.

We looked at Veritas.

I'd give Zerto a good look. Put it through its paces. Look at how you're already offering a DR exercise and how complicated it is in your life. If you're looking at a run book for a DR exercise and your part is two or three paragraphs, Zerto can make it one paragraph.

I would strongly recommend Zerto to make it a little easier and would rate it a ten on a scale from one to ten.

We use Zerto to replicate to a cloud center.

Zerto saved us a lot of money compared to the cost of replicating at the LUN level. It also really simplified it and gave us shorter RTOs and RPOs.

We got hit with ransomware about three years ago, so we had to do a full recovery with Zerto. The recovery is the best feature.

When you compare the ease of use of Zerto versus that of SAN, Zerto is a lot easier because you can do it at the actual virtual machine level versus doing the whole LUN. In the latter case, in the event of a recovery, you would have to recover the whole LUN and see what's in there. It is a lot easier to do any operation with Zerto.

We were hit with ransomware about three years ago, and the amount of time that it took us to recover from that with Zerto was weeks less than it would've taken us with our previous DR solution.

When you compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions, Zerto is a lot easier and faster because you can choose what to recover and when. In the event of a disaster, for instance, you can recover your most important stuff first.

Zerto certainly reduced the staff involved in a data recovery situation. It's so easy to use that one person can do it all in those events. You won't need a guy from the VMware team and another from the storage team. It's all done at the DM level, so, it's easier to recover without having to involve other teams. With our previous solution, we would have needed three to recover, and I was able to do it all myself with Zerto.

It absolutely helped to reduce our organization's DR testing because it's so fast and easy to test without disrupting anything. We can choose what to test, more critical versus noncritical, and how frequently we want to test. About 75% of that saved time is allocated to value-added tasks.

I would like to be able to replicate one to multiple without having to recreate every VPG. That would save us a lot of time. When we add a site or move our DR to a different site, I have to recreate everything from scratch. So, it'd be cool to be able to just repoint an existing VPG to a new site without having to recreate everything.

We started using Zerto in mid-2018.

We haven't had any issues with stability. It's always up and running. Whenever there's an issue at the DM level that affects it, it'll give an alert.

It seems like Zerto would be good for a big environment. Ours is small and doesn't really grow a lot; the size stays static. However, having worked with it for a few years I wouldn't be worried to use it in a bigger environment.

Zerto's technical support is good. Whenever we have issues, which is rare, they are fast to respond. When we had our major issue, I had a lot of calls with them, and we had to work around the clock. They did a good job of passing us through every time zone and keeping us engaged with someone. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We used the snapshot and replication of our SAN that we used to have. It wasn't necessarily a true DR replication tool, but it would do a snapshot and then put a copy of that snapshot somewhere else. That was our DR plan before switching to Zerto.

The initial setup was really easy and fast. We had it installed in less than an hour, maybe even half an hour. After that, we created our groups. The time for that would depend on how many DMs you have, but it's easy and intuitive.

We had someone from Zerto walk us through the installation and setup. They explained every step as we went through it, and it was excellent.

We certainly have seen an ROI. When we got hit, we saved a lot of money because we were able to recover RBMs. Without Zerto, we would have been in serious trouble. So, it definitely returned the investment many times over.

The pricing is pretty competitive to that of other options out there. When we shopped around, it was in line with the price of other solutions.

We looked at Veeam and Avamar. At that point, Zerto was the only one that did CDP, and that was the reason we went with Zerto.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate Zerto a ten.

Our primary use case for Zerto is disaster recovery.

It's very simple to use and configure.

The orchestration and automation of the DR and how it replicates the VMs and then picks them up in the DR site have been most valuable.

This solution could be improved if it met all the requirements that we look for including supporting multiple operating systems. We would prefer to use one solution for DR and backup.

We have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. We haven't experienced any issues.

We have a small environment so it may not be applicable to comment on scalability. What I can say is we took two of the largest virtual machines in our environment, created a VPG for them, set up the seeding and replication and Zerto easily supported this. If there was going to be any concern, we would've seen it with these two VMs. So far it looks good.

The customer support for this solution is okay. I have only opened up one support case. We were looking for someone to assist us right away. It was a Severity 2 case, with Severity 1 being the highest. They sent me an email but couldn't help me the same day. I was hoping that I could speak with them the same day to get some support.

I would rate them a six out of ten. 

Neutral

We previously tried Veeam's replication tool and it didn't work out too well. That's why we decided to go to Zerto. Zerto is much easier to set up and offers a faster speed of recovery.

The initial setup was straightforward. How the VPGs are configured and adding the VMs is simple and pretty intuitive. It took under an hour to set up. 

The setup was completed by myself and a colleague.

The pricing for this solution is reasonable. 

I would advise others to take extra time before jumping into the setup, to consider the grouping of the VPGs and what makes the most sense for their business. It was important for our business to take that extra time to make sure that we got that right. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution for replication from our primary data center to the secondary data center.

The replication feature and DR functionality are most valuable. Zerto has many options when a new server is provisioned. If the application team would like to use a replication process, DR process, or RPO, Zerto can facilitate this within 15 to 20 minutes.

This solution could be improved by including some sort of compression or de-duplication for the same type of files.

We have been using this solution for three years.

It can be scalable depending on the licenses which can be quite expensive. 

We previously used SRM. SRM is as not as good at Zerto. That's the reason we bought the licensed product as opposed to the free product. I'm hoping that Zerto will be used in the future in our company for data replication purposes like SQL data.

The initial setup was very easy. I followed the documentation to set it up myself. The person completing the setup needs to understand the storage layer and the network layer for the backup. Without this understanding, It may be extremely confusing.

When you apply Zerto to your environment, you need to understand your networking settings, storage settings, and your capacity planning. Setting up Zerto took us 15 minutes. 

We recently bought more licenses and are exploiting the benefits of Zerto so I would say we are seeing a return on investment. 

Zerto helped to reduce downtime drastically by 80%. I would advise others to complete a full evaluation process to ensure they get the most out of it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our main use case for this solution is the data center migration. We are in the process of moving from our legacy data center and all the VMs into our new data center.

In the future, we would like to look more into disaster recovery using Zerto but that's a much longer process and we are still looking into it.

The speed of recovery with Zerto is at least five to ten times faster. It helped us reduce downtime during migrations. There would've been a lot more downtime had we done a standard migration across data centers, powering everything down. This downtime would have cost our company millions.

The ease of use and simplicity in moving things without having to do a cross vCenter V-motions has been most valuable. It saves time and effort and it eliminates mistakes. This project would've been years if not for Zerto. We completed it in months instead of years.

The licensing is confusing and complicated.

I have been using this solution for two years.

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. We used it for our biggest data center and it handled it just fine. We haven't personally had to scale it up, but if we needed to, we definitely could.

Support has been pretty good. I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I personally have not used other solutions other than just what's built into VMware. When comparing the VMware native solution versus Zerto, it's night and day. It's much simpler and straightforward to set up.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is streamlined with simple instructions. Anybody can do it as long as they understand their infrastructure.

We had a contractor that we brought in to help us with it. 

We have seen return in our investment with Zerto due to the speed and usability and being able to do this huge project with limited hiccups.

I would advise others that the cost of this solution is justified based on the value you receive. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

We use Zerto to help our customers migrate and consolidate data centers, especially crossing different geo spaces or long distances.

I haven't used it for downtime, but our customers have it configured for all of their disaster recovery needs.

We work a lot with customers that need disaster recovery and the best possible migration approaches, and Zerto helps them minimize the amount of effort it takes to finish their upgrades or migrations.

Zerto helped reduce our customer's VR testing. It allows them to do disaster recovery tests a lot better and a lot safer without affecting the production environment. Last year I helped two customers migrate over 10,000 servers across the country and across Europe. Automating the process was extremely valuable in those migrations.

The near-zero downtime for migrating from one data center to another has been the most valuable outcome of using Zerto. When you are migrating half a petabyte of data from Texas to Las Vegas, and you're doing that with 3000 servers, you have a limited time to take down the application and bring it up. Our customers like having the downtime minimized.

The biggest improvement would be exporting VPGs and a configuration of VPGs, as well as increasing or improving their IP customization rule set.

I have been using Zerto for seven years.

This is a stable solution. We ran into a minimal amount of bugs and the bugs that we do run into, we have workarounds for.

This solution can definitely scale out very well. I'm looking forward to new improvements in Zerto for Azure. These improvements would definitely make scaling out Zerto much better.

I would rate the support for this solution a ten out of ten. I've called Zerto's support for almost every case that I've needed to. They've been able to resolve the issues in a timely fashion.

Positive

I've used many other options. Zerto is definitely the best of the bunch. Zerto is definitely a lot easier to install than products like Set Recovery Manager, and it includes the replication technology that is agnostic from any storage replication that would be required.

Our customers definitely see a return on investment, especially with time savings, by doing required compliance testing for disaster recovery with a minimal amount of effort.

The pricing is top tier but offers good value. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

Our main use case for this solution is disaster recovery, migration and app testing.

Zerto helped to reduce downtime. I worked a lot in a consulting capacity and experienced DR situations where XYZ was down or a data center was down. Using Zerto to get them back up and online was a lifesaver.

Zerto reduced the staff involved in data recovery. It's a tool that allows you to do a lot just with one person at the console.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the live migration. 

This solution could be improved by being more cloud agnostic. 

I have been using this solution for eight years.

This is a very stable product. I've never heard anybody complain about its stability. I would say it's probably one of the best out there.

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support for this solution is good and their staff are knowledgeable and able to assist quickly with resolutions. 

I would rate them a nine out of ten. 

Positive

I've used several other products including Site Recovery Manager. Zerto is the easiest to learn. There is much less of a learning curve. Other tools specific to VMware are now trying to emulate what Zerto has done to make processes easier. Zerto was a huge step in making things more simple to manage. The app works really well and integrates with VMware really well. 

The initial setup is straightforward, especially if those setting it up understand the company's infrastructure. The problems are not directly related to Zerto itself. They're always related to how the infrastructure is set up or how the network itself is segmented and having certain people that have control or access and others that don't.

The return on investment is in the ease and functionality of the tool as opposed to actually a gain from using the tool.

There may be less expensive solutions on the market but with Zerto, you get what you pay for. A lot of people don't like to think about the price until it's already happened and then the price is too high because they would be losing either way. It's better to think about it and pay for it upfront than pay for it after the problem.

We previously used and considered Site Recovery Manager.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use it mostly for VMs that are hosting client-facing applications and mostly client databases. We replicate 100 servers; we have 100 protected VMs.

We've never had any major headaches with the virtual-protection groups. They seem to work exactly as they should. If there's ever an issue with replication, we know right away, so it's all been very reliable.

Zerto is much easier to use than Veeam when you compare the two in terms of ease of use. Everything is very straightforward and simple in the Web Client. It's very clear if something is wrong, and everything in the Web Client works great. In Veeam, it's a little more complex; I find myself having to look through long error messages when a job fails. Whereas with Zerto, if I see a red VPG I can click on it. I would then know exactly which VM is having an issue, and I can try to troubleshoot the issue.

The time between releases is too long. Zerto doesn't seem to really keep up with the products with which they need to be compatible. For instance, the 9.5 updates 3 took about 90 days to come out after the latest version of vCenter 7.0 update 3 was released.

We were facing a vulnerability, so we had to choose between patching our vCenter to address that vulnerability, which would break the Zerto operability, or leaving it as is with a potential vulnerability. That was really the main issue we ever faced with Zerto.

I've been working with Zerto for the past three or so years, but my company used it before I started working there.

Zerto is very stable. I've never had an issue related to stability with Zerto, and anytime we have had any potential issues, we get alerts from Zerto. It has always been a simple fix. Also, the issue has never had to do with the platform; it's always been a VM that was powered off or deleted.

Technical support has been pretty sufficient. I've only had one or two cases ever that weren't related to looking for a release date, but I've had pretty good success with them so far.

I would give technical support a rating of eight out of ten. They've never particularly impressed me, but they've always done their job.

Positive

I was not present for the initial setup, but I deployed Zerto Virtual Manager. It was pretty straightforward. You walk through the wizard, and if you have all your networks on the server and everything is done correctly, you can start to build VPGs right away.

If you have all of the network and firewall rules already in place, you could probably stand up a new one in 45 minutes.

It's a pretty set-it-and-forget-it type of tool, and it's very reliable. So, I would rate it an eight on a scale from one to ten.

Our use case is disaster recovery or failover. It makes it a lot easier for us to actually test DR because of some of the coordination and orchestration that are a part of Zerto. However, our use case is strictly DR, making sure that we have the right RPOs, and Zerto does a good job of handling that.

Zerto improved a lot of the processes that we do for disaster recovery. It makes it a lot easier when we talk to our upper management and letting them know that we have a way of getting data from one data center over to another data center without a whole lot of friction.

I like that the failover is simple and that it's a stable platform. It makes it easy for us to do failovers in the event that we have an issue. It also makes it easier to do tests of failovers prior to actually doing a real failover. This means that we can pull things back or commit them over on the other side. Zerto streamlines the process instead of having to have a whole team of people who are dedicated to disaster recovery.

When you compare the ease of use of Zerto versus that of SRM, it's a night-and-day difference. SRM was very kludgy to set up when we implemented it. Zerto was a lot more streamlined from that perspective. SRM wasn't very stable for us, sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't. With Zerto, we rarely have any issues that can't be fixed with a phone call. It doesn't require a full rebuild, and the upgrades are simpler. It's just a better solution all around.

We don't have a whole lot of downtime, to begin with. When we've had issues, Zerto has allowed us to move the workloads quicker. I would say from a configuration perspective, Zerto saved us quite a bit of time over SRM. Zerto is a set-it-and-forget-it type of tool. We get into it only when we need to.

When you compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions its fairly quick. We can failover a workload from our headquarters to our DR facility and have it up and running in 10 or 15 minutes, which is pretty good. A five-minute migration is also a nice feature.

Zerto hasn't reduced the staff involved in a data recovery situation because we're a fairly thin IT assistance team. However, with Zerto, we don't have to plan ahead for additional resources just for an eventual or potential failover.

When we do regular disaster recoveries, where we do a full failover and test in our DR facility for a couple of days, Zerto makes it a lot easier to move it from one place to another and make the VM agnostic to the datacenter.

We're an NSX-T shop, and if I could get an NSX-T integration where it could manage the networks a little tighter, that would be an improvement.

The other improvement is working with storage vendors, like Pure Storage for the synchronization of the data similar to what SRM does. Using Zerto for the orchestration, and the hardware vendor for the replication would be beneficial.

I have been using Zerto for about three years.

The stability is very good. It's rare that we have a complete outage. Sometimes, we have a VPG that doesn't replicate correctly, but a call to tech support gets it resolved.

Right now, we have about 120 VMs that are being replicated, and we have an eight-second RPO. I consider that good performance for our workloads. I know we could scale out easily using our current configuration.

Zerto's technical support is very strong. When we have an issue, it gets resolved quickly. We have never had an issue with Zerto's support.

We've had good experiences with all of the engineers that we've worked with, so on a scale from one to ten, I would rate them at nine.

Positive

We used SRM previously, and it wasn't very good. We ended up having to rebuild it a few times.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. Everything made sense, and after a couple of days, we were up and running.

We had an engineer from Zerto help us with the implementation.

I think the cost is reasonable for VM licensing. It's not outside the scope of an enterprise product.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Zerto at nine.

We started off using this solution for disaster recovery and DR testing but then it morphed into more of a file recovery tool. We can usually get closer to a point in time recovery using Zerto versus the nightly backups that we do.

Zerto gives us peace of mind knowing that if we were attacked by ransomware, we would be able to recover data from the time before the ransomware to get us back to being fully functional. Zerto helped to reduce our company's disaster recovery testing model to where we can do it all within a day. We normally pick a time around lunchtime on a set day for the different groups to test with and it is completed by the time lunch is over. 

It definitely does make life easier when you're in a situation where you have to have all hands on deck as it doesn't require you to have as many people to bring everything back up.

The file recovery functionality is definitely the most valuable as well as the amount of time it takes to recover a VM. The different snapshots it makes are great, especially when we try to schedule DR testing with our business unit. The less time that we have to spin up the environment, the better the whole testing process will go.

One common use case I'll get is when someone says, "I deleted," or, "I've changed a file." I can ask them, "What time did you do it?" If they tell me a specific time, for example, 1:15 PM, I can pull that file at 1:14 PM and recover the data.

The backup end of this solution could be improved. We tried using it as a full backup solution and it took way too long to complete at least one backup. We tried it once and didn't try again. I'm not sure if they've improved that since then but we actually went in a different direction for backups.

I have been using this solution for six years.

This is a stable solution. 

We haven't had to scale much as we're a small business. If we were to grow, it would be a couple of servers at a time so I can't really speak to the scalability of it. We have 400 servers total and only use Zerto with what we consider mission critical.

The customer support is excellent. When you call with an issue, they answer almost immediately. The guys are really knowledgeable.

I would rate their support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

We started off with Site Recovery Manager. We did not like the process and once we tried Zerto, we saw how easy it was. That's been the solution until recently as we've added a second data center in which we use now Pure Storage with VMware. They do active clustering and we can use a simple vMotion to move from one site to another versus the way we used to do it before completing a migration with Zerto. 

We still keep using Zerto because we know Zerto works. Zerto is a lot faster especially compared to what we used to do with Site Recovery Manager.

The initial setup is straightforward. I just followed the documentation online and it was set up in a day.

I completed the setup myself. There may have been a help check afterwards once we got the first test recovery group setup. 

Based on the fact that we can rely on Zerto for recovery if anything were to happen and the confidence that our management has in this product, it's definitely worth the money. 

We paid a big investment upfront with renewal fees each year. This is another reason why it's easier for us to keep this product as well as have another solution, because we've already paid the money upfront.

When evaluating Zerto, I would advise others to try to think of any potential scenario to test with and use it to prove whether it does or doesn't work.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.