HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We use it for disaster recovery. We use it for some testing. And we use it for hot backups on databases.

This past summer we had multiple hurricanes down south. We host for our clients, and what we did was proactively move them from their location down south up to our Boise data center in Idaho. We were able to do that with Zerto.

When you need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases both the time it takes and the number of people involved. I was actually part of a project to move a data center, and we used Zerto to move it. We moved 20,000 virtual machines and the downtime was just a reboot of each machine. Before, it probably would have taken at least six people in multiple teams to do it, whereas in this move it was just two engineers from the same team who did it.

In addition, we recently had a corrupt database that we recovered using Zerto. If we didn't have Zerto, we would have had to do a restore and we would have had a loss of data of up to 24 hours, because the backups were done every 24 hours. In this case, we were able to roll the database back to a point in time that the DBAs deemed had good data. There was very little data loss as a result. Using Zerto in that situation saved us at least eight hours and from having to use multiple teams.

In that situation, for the recovery we would have done a restore from backup. The problem is we would have had X amount of hours of data loss. I don't know how long it would have taken the DBAs or our developers or app owners to reproduce the information that would have been lost. That could have ended up taking days. I've seen it take days in the past to recreate data that was lost as part of the recovery process.

Another point is that the solution has reduced the staff involved in overall backup and DR management. The big thing is that it reduces the teams involved. So rather than having the SAN team involved, the backup team involved, and the virtualization engineers, it ends up being just the virtualization engineers who do all the work. It has reduced the number of people involved from six to eight people down to a single engineer.

The most valuable features of this solution is the ease of use. In the event of a disaster, you don't need a technical person to actually run the software. You can bring anybody in, with the right instructions and credentials, and they can run the solution.

Having been in disaster situations myself, one of the things that a lot of companies miss is the fact that, during a test, it's all hands on deck, but during a disaster not all those hands are there. I don't know what the statistics are, but it's quite infrequent that you have the ability to get the technical people necessary to do technical stuff. I was also part of the post-9/11 disaster recovery review, and one of the key conversations was about situations where an organization had the solution in place but they didn't have the people. Their solutions were quite complex, whereas with Zerto you can do it with a mouse. You can do it with non-technical staff, as long as you have your documentation in proper order.

I've been doing disaster recovery for 20 years and, in my opinion, the solution's continuous protection is the best on the market. The ability to do the split-write, without any interruption to the production server, and the ability to roll back to any point in time you desire, are two really key features. The back-end technology, the split-write and the appliances, they've got that down very well.

There's room for improvement with the GUI. The interface ends up coming down to a personal preference thing and where you like to see things. It's like getting into a new car. You have to relearn where the gauges are.

I'd also like to see them go to an appliance-based solution, rather than our standing up a VM. While the GUI ends up depending on personal preference, the actual platform that the GUI is created on needs to go to an appliance base.

Another area for improvement I'd like to see is the tuning of the VRAs built into the GUI. It's a little cryptic. You really have to be a very technical engineer to get that deep into it. I'd like to see a little better interface that allows you to do that tuning yourself, rather than trying to get their engineer and your engineer together to do it.

I've been using Zerto for five years.

We had a rough start, but in defense of that, we were doing a lot of going long-distance with what we had.

The thing that I liked most about the problems that we had was that Zerto wasn't afraid to admit it. They also weren't afraid to put us in touch with the right staff on their side. It wasn't a big deal for me to talk to their developer. Normally, when you're at that level, the developers are shielded from customers, whereas with Zerto it was a more personal type of service that I got. We had a problem and they put me in touch with the developer who developed that piece of the solution and we brought it to resolution.

It's very scalable. We grew from just a few hundred to a few thousand pretty quickly, and there were very few hiccups during that process.

Out of the gate, when you call their number, they could do better. 

The thing is that I've developed such a good relationship with all of them, at all levels at Zerto, that I know who to call. If you're off the street and you call in, you're going to get that level-one support who's going to move you through it. When I call in, they put me right through to the level-two support and I move from there. It's like any support, if you know the right people, you can skip the helpdesk level and go right into the engineering.

The disaster recovery solution for the company I'm currently with was the typical restore from backups. They were using SAN replication as part of it. 

Personally, I've used many solutions over the years, starting with spinning tape, boot-from-disk, and then as we virtualized the data center, we started doing SAN-based replication. I've deployed and supported VMware Site Recovery Manager under different replication solutions, and then moved into Zerto. Prior to Zerto I used several different vendors' products.

Having been in disasters, living in Florida and experiencing them, I understand what it takes to recover a data center. I worked for my city in Florida and volunteered in the emergency operation center. Not only did I sit in technical meetings on how to recover computers, but I also sat in meetings on how to recover the city. So I have a different perspective when it comes to disaster recovery. I have a full view of how and what it takes to recover a city, as well as how and what it takes to recover a data center. Using that background, I pull them together.

As a result, I first look for a solution that works. That's key. If it doesn't work, it's out the door. The second factor is its ease of use. It has to be very easy to use, just a few clicks of the mouse and you're able to do a recovery. Zerto meets my requirements.

Not only was the initial setup simple, but upgrades actually work and backward compatibility during the upgrades work. I've been doing IT for 25 years and it's one of the few solutions that I have come across where backups work, not only doing the actual backup, but they're compatible with what you have in place. Upgrades are very impressive and very seamless.

I started with working with Zerto during the 4.5 version. Right after we deployed that we went to 5.0. The length of time really varies depending upon your engineering platform process. I did the PoC and all the documentation, and then I did the deployment into production. I spent a few days on the PoC because I needed to know what its performance impact was going to be on the host, on the VMs. Then I had to see what the replication impact was going to be as well. 

And documentation took me a couple of weeks. Because I've been in disasters, when I do documentation I do it so that I can hand it to anybody, literally, including—and I've done it—to the janitor. I've handed the documentation to the janitor and I've had them sit down and do a recovery. I'm picky on documentation. 

The actual sit-down at the keyboard to do the deployment, after everything was in place, including getting a service account, getting the VM deployed, etc., was quick. In one day we had it up and running.

I tend to do it myself because I'm old-school. I want to know how it works right from the ground up so that if I have to do any trouble shooting, I know where not to go to look at things. If you understand how something works, you can troubleshoot a lot faster.

I'm the lead architect, engineer, and troubleshooter. We have about four other people who are involved with it. We have several people because of our locations. We have more here, in the Idaho area, than we do in our other data center. We have one down in the southeast, hurricane area, of the United States. They're not expected to do a whole lot of disaster recovery, whereas we are.

I don't dive too much into the pricing side of things, but I'd like to see better tiering for Zerto's pricing. We do multi-tier VMs. I don't think I should be paying a penalty and price for a tier-three VM where I don't need a really tight SLA like I do for a tier-one.

Also, if we're looking to replace the data center backup solution, I have VMs that I may not need for a week in the event of a disaster. I'd like to see a backup price per VM, rather than the tier-one licensing that I currently pay for, per VM. I'd like to see better tiering in regards to the licensing.

We have Commvault, Cohesity, and Veeam. Veeam is probably the closest to Zerto for ease of use. The problem is that Veeam doesn't have the technical background of the split-write that Zerto has. Veeam can be very painful. It can't protect any VM in your infrastructure. Its process of doing snapshots is very painful. Whereas with Zerto, it doesn't matter how busy the VM is, it can protect it. Veeam does not do it that way, but its GUI is pretty easy to use. But again, if it doesn't work, it doesn't matter how easy it is.

Commvault and Cohesity are both complicated solutions. Cohesity is like Veem, it is snapshot technology. Its GUI is okay but it's a little cryptic and that's the thing that I don't like about it. With 25 years of doing IT, I can tell that the interface that Cohesity designed was done by Linux engineers. It's very kludgy with multiple clicks. You've got to know where to go. With Zerto, it's plain and it's simple to use.

Do your homework. Do a PoC. Make sure you have technical people doing your PoC, people who can dive deep into the technology. If you do your due diligence on the PoC, it will win every time. We did the PoC against five other products, and no one could touch Zerto on the technical side of it, at all, and that's besides the ease of use.

What I've learned from using it is to make sure you're able to tune the replication. Like any replication, if you're doing boot from stand or you're replicating your launch from place to place, you have to tune it. I was fortunate. I've been tuning replication for many years. If you're doing long distance, you have very high latency and you need to compensate for that. I worked with Zerto developers and we were able to tune replication to meet our site-to-site requirements. That was a key thing, and that's missed a lot of times. When people deploy the solution, they're not always keeping up with the SLA, and it has nothing to do with how it was deployed. It has to do with the pipe and the latency between site-to-site. That tends to be missed when deploying replication.

It is on our drawing board to look at Zerto for backups and long-term retention. I would say we're going to end up using it. It makes sense, at least from my standpoint, to keep things simple. It already has the data, so why not use it to move it wherever?

When it comes to the fact that it provides both backup and disaster recovery in one platform, I had never thought about the backup piece. When they announced it, it just made sense to me as an engineer with a logical mind. "Hey, I'm already holding the data, shoveling it across states. Instead of putting it here, why not put it over here at the same time?" So I was very excited about a two-for-one product. My company has backup solutions and they're struggling with them. I'm looking to replace their backup solutions with Zerto, probably in 2021.

We're also still looking at doing DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. We've done some testing with it. In my previous company we were using it and deployed it around the globe. Due to border restrictions, we had to go to the cloud with it. It was big because we were able to go to the cloud and we didn't have to stand up another data center. I'll be conservative and say that it saved us a few million dollars.

I give Zerto a nine out of 10. The only reason that I'm not giving it a 10 is that I'd like to see the GUI made into an appliance.

I am a system engineer and IT architect. We use Zerto to protect our production -environment and critical applications. Everything is on-prem. We don't do any DR to the cloud. We're protecting around 300 VMs right now.

I've been fortunate enough not to need to rely on Zerto in an actual disaster, but we do testing every year. Sometimes, it's multiple times annually or at the year's end. It takes the recovery workflow, which would normally take a lot of planning, and reduces that to just a few minutes. 

The most valuable feature is the low RTO that covers our VMs and a secondary data center.

I would like Zerto to add support for VMware's lifecycle manager. 

I have used Zerto for about eight years.

I rate Zerto eight out of 10 for scalability. We have one instance per data center that supports everything that we need, and we haven't had to scale past that.

It's been several years since we've looked at other products. We used VMware SRM in the past, but Zerto is way faster. Zerto is easier to use than other solutions we've tried. 

Zerto is easy to set up. Once you've deployed the appliance and connected it to a  vCenter, your VMs are protected pretty quickly.

Zerto costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year, and we haven't needed to use it in a real DR situation, so it's hard to quantify an ROI. However, based on what we know from testing, it will be a huge benefit in the worst-case scenario. 

Zerto's pricing is pretty competitive. They recently went through a licensing change where you have to buy an enterprise license as an organization. We weren't happy with that just because it forced us to pay for extra features we don't use. We would prefer if we could still have that standard license.

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.

We are primarily using it for migration and data protection. We use it for protection of the VM and data protection. 

It's the easiest way to support DR as it does the conversion for you. After converting, it protects again. If you don't want Azure, you can just go back on-premises, for example. 

We can monitor VMs more easily with Zerto. We can always check if they aren't properly syncing. The migrations are also easy. 

The overall impact on our RPOs has been amazing. The ease of using it is great. Everyone is embracing it in our company.

The ease of use is ten out of ten. It's the easiest to use. 

The speed of recovery is great, especially the failover/failback. It helps our company a lot. 

The most valuable feature is the GUI. It's very simple. 

Setting it up is very easy. 

Everything is automated using scripts. 

The solution saves a lot of time and there is no downtime based on how the product is designed. If there's any downtime, it's only a second or two if we move. 

The near-synchronous replication is great. It just works. I'm a big fan of Zerto.

Right now, the solution is perfect. They shouldn't try to do everything. Zerto is DR and needs to focus on that. Everything works for us. There is nothing to improve. 

They already released the features that we want. We aren't missing any features. 

I've been using it for almost five years now. 

At first, when Zerto was bought by HP, we thought it was just going to be HP. However, Zerto is really working out and the stability is great. I hope they continue what they are doing and refrain from making major changes. 

Zerto scales pretty well. They have a lot of customers. The word of mouth is helping with growth.

It scales well with our environment with the conversion from VM to Azure and vice versa. It's so easy. There's no middle-man involved. It's just Zerto. 

The technical support is hit or miss. If it is a high-priority ticket, you get great Zerto support, however, if you just have a question, they redirect you to their documents. 

Positive

We previously used SRM before Zerto. 

The initial setup was not hard at all. We deployed a VM and had our team open the ports and we were all set. 

It only takes about an hour or two if you have the proper people helping you with the networking. 

We have witnessed a lot of ROI. Being technical, I always ask to make sure management is happy with the product we are trying to use. With the migration feature, it's way better now. We are able to migrate from the old data center without any disruption. That's a big win. 

The pricing is fair. The pricing is very competitive and it works well. You are paying for a product that is easy to use and just works. 

We've evaluated multiple DRs and some VMware products. Zerto was the winner due to the GUI. Also, it just works.

I have colleagues who are doing a POC with Zerto and will begin using it based on my recommendation. 

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. If I could give it eleven out of ten I would. 

We are using Zerto as a DR solution for our environment as well as for migrations. When we do data center migrations, we use it to move our servers over.

We are only on-prem at the moment. We do not do disaster recovery in the cloud.

In the old days, during data center swaps, it used to take days to move our workload environments over, whereas now, it literally takes an hour for hundreds of servers to migrate. Literally, in under a minute, an app stack can move down and up in a new data center. It is reflected in the uptime support to our customers. Our company is very happy with the product.

Essentially, you just tell it to go and pull the trigger. It is all automatic, so you can sit there and watch the shutdown within vCenter, and then on the remote side, you can see it coming up. You can literally have your environment up and running in under a minute. You just have to prioritize what goes first, and that is a business decision.

Its automation and the ability to replicate and keep an RTO of just seconds is valuable. It is all automatic. Everything is pretty transparent on the backend. It is just point-and-go.

Its near-synchronous replication is amazing. It is a lifesaver. You can see it replicating in real-time in seconds. The overall impact on the network is negligible as well. It is a great tool.

From the technical side, there can be a little bit more PowerShell integration. I know it leverages APIs, but people still use PowerShell. Some people would rather use PowerShell if that is an option.

I have used it across several employers. I probably used it for a total of four or five years before it was bought out by HPE.

It is amazing. You just look at the dashboard, and it is pretty much all green unless you have some replication or journaling issues, but that is not the product's fault. 

Scalability has not been an issue. You deploy it, and it just ramps up and goes. It is all in the background and automatic.

We have about 700 servers and 130 VPGs.

I would rate them a ten out of ten. They are very responsive and technical. Even when there is no issue and you are looking for a root cause or just a question, they are very responsive. They exceed their SLAs.

Positive

My current employer already had it in place. In my previous role, it was evaluated against a few other competitors, and it ended up being a replacement for VMware's Disaster Recovery, which at that time had a lot of issues. Zerto came in and helped us out. We implemented a few new things that Zerto did not have, and I have not looked back.

Zerto is easy to use. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of ease of use.

Currently, we are still on version 9. We have deployed that. Overall, it is very easy once you get the Windows Server. I am excited about the new version 10 coming out that takes away the Windows server requirement.

We did not use an integrator or a reseller, but we are in contact with our engineer from Zerto. I personally know him from a previous job and as a friend as well. If I have questions, I am sure he will help me out.

Uptime for our customers is important. When we are able to do transitions and not impact customers or minimize that impact, that is a financial gain at the end of the day in terms of the satisfaction that customers get, as well as the overall view of the company. As a whole, the management sees that we are doing this stuff in minutes and hours versus days. So, overall, the company is not looking to move away from Zerto anytime soon.

I know it is per server, but I am not fully aware of the price model. I know for our VDI environment, they are looking at something that is on the lower end and that they can use just for migrations and not so much a disaster recovery.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. It scales well. It just works. It is amazingly simple. Everything is pretty much automatic. I cannot remember when I had to open a case because Zerto was not working.

Our primary use case for Zerto is for disaster recovery. In the last few versions, they've offered backup, but we don't use it because it's not nearly as robust as what most of our customers are looking for. We also use it for migrations too, to migrate customers into our cloud, and things like that. But that's around 20% of our use case.

Zerto has enabled our growth. Five years ago we had around 20 customers and now we have 500. We protect around 15,000 VMs now.

One of the most valuable features is the analytics portal. It's still an evolving feature and has ways to go but we use that for monitoring because we have hundreds of sites. It's nice that all the alerts and everything is consolidated into that one site because we used to have to make sure that we were connected to many, many sites to make alerting work, which was a nightmare. 

Our alerting is done through scripting too. They do have pre-canned alerting through but is not very robust and they're working on it. They actually included us in the study on it. For instance, if you were to have a problem at a certain site or something, there's no way that you could take it out of monitoring. If you were using their system, it would just flood you with alerts from all kinds of stuff from the site if it was down. It is great if a site is down and you don't expect it, but if you have planned maintenance, you don't want all of this coming in.

There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better.

We reduced the number of people involved in recovery situations by using Zerto. We had another solution before and we had a small number of customers and it took the whole team to manage 20 customers. Now we have 400 to 500 customers and our team is relatively the same size. We're broken up into different teams, but when we managed it all ourselves with only 20 customers, we had four people. And now we have around 500 customers and we have around 20 team members.

Zerto has a really robust PowerShell and scripting that you can get lots of numbers out of but it's not exactly the easiest thing to do. Zerto has a few nice pre-canned reports but there is a need for more. Unless you script something, it's difficult to go in, click a button, and see the information that you may be looking for.

The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited.

Zerto is very easy to use on the surface, especially if you're an enterprise customer, which is just like A to B replication or one site to two sites. As a cloud provider, they still have a lot of work to do. But for most customers, it would be fantastic. We have a lot of private clouds that are one site or two sites. So when it's not meshed like our larger environment is, it works fantastic. But when you get into the overall fully meshed model with vCD integration that we have, it doesn't work as well. I think Zerto is mostly concentrated on the enterprise customer and left the cloud providers by the wayside.

With the HP acquisition, product development has certainly accelerated. They recently released the first major half release and have put additional focus on cloud providers. Unfortunately, the major focus remains on Enterprise. Next year, they will force customers to move from Windows management VMs to Debian Linux. I can only hope they have a well-thought-out migration tool. My fear is that the cloud provider will be a secondary thought once again.

The major issue with Zerto development is that they refuse to patch the current software release and only patch the newest release. When you hit the bug, they expect you to upgrade right away. This is not an issue if you only have a hand full of sites. The issue when you have 100s is that there is no way to skip a minor release. Every multi-tenant customer you have must be upgraded to every minor release. Two to three upgrades every year for every customer is very intrusive and requires way more management effort than should be necessary. We often have a hand full of customers delaying the upgrade cycle and are forced to discontinue service to those customers. HP can surely develop a better model.

I have been using Zerto for six and a half years. It's deployed on-premises, on the cloud, and we use it as a SaaS offering. We are the cloud provider. We also integrate with AWS and Azure.

It's a very stable solution, for the most part. They have a new release every six months and some releases are better than others as far as bugs. Sometimes those bugs have to do with something in Hyper-V, and sometimes they have something to do with VMware or vCenter. But many times, it's directly related to Zerto's problems. Usually, their major releases go in .0 and .5. The .0 releases have the new features in them and they're more buggy and the .5 releases are more stable.

It's extremely scalable, in a small sense, but the problem is when you get very meshed, with 10 sites replicating to 10 sites, and each one of them is meshed in to be able to replicate it to the other one. Then scalability starts to become problematic.

The big thing is, we have a cloud manager that manages all our ZVMs, which enterprise customers probably wouldn't have. You can only upgrade half a release for each upgrade. So you couldn't go from Zerto 6 to Zerto 7. For instance, you have to go to 6.5 and then go to seven.

Trying to upgrade is not easy because every customer that's paired and replicating into those sites has to upgrade it in those steps. It takes us several months, twice a year, to get everybody upgraded. They have a portal called Cloud Control which makes things better as far as upgrades, but they recently broke it with version 7.5 by adding encryption. So it was useless. We just upgraded to a version in which it should be working again, so the next time we're going to try to use Cloud Control to upgrade. Hopefully, it will be better. We only really have one round of upgrades through Cloud Control to get an idea of how well it worked. 75% of the time, those upgrades work without problems.

There was a time when they had customer service people just taking tickets and they couldn't really help you at all, which was terrible. Now, they have a level-one level-two-type model. The level-one guys are getting better, but as they grow, it can be difficult. 

All of our engineers are certified and we would like to go straight to level two. A lot of times we waste a lot of time with level one, and then they put the ticket in the queue for level two. So it takes another day to get to level two unless we're really loud and escalating the ticket right away. The biggest problem that we have with Zerto is getting to level two. 90% of the time, because of our knowledge, level one is not useful to us. Although, it probably would be to the average customer. 

Zerto really needs support dedicated to CSPs and large customers.

Positive

We switched from our previous solution because Zerto was so much easier than everything else that we saw. We have a team that does the tests. It was a pretty easy choice to move away from those platforms at the time and those platforms no longer exist. Today there are many alternative DRaaS solutions and we offer many of them. Zerto remains more mature and feature-rich than the competition though.

The initial setup was pretty easy. You have to have connectivity between the sites that you're replicating, your production, and then your DR site or sites. Getting that connectivity is the biggest thing. Once that connectivity is there, it's fairly simple. You deploy Windows VM, put a small software package on it, and then pair the two. You do the same thing at the recovery site and once those sites are able to talk. In VMware, you install a VM on each ESX host that you need to replicate a VM on. Then you create a policy to do that replication. The replication policies work very well. Re-IP on failover if problematic.

The network connectivity takes the longest. It can take weeks, depending on what you have to do to connect the sites. It could be a couple of hours if you're just setting up a VPN. If you're putting in a circuit, it could take a very long time. That's the X factor with it, but assuming that's already there, within an hour you could be replicating data from one site to another.

ZCCs remain a major stumbling block. If the routing table has issues, the only fix is to delete all protection, redeploy the ZCC and rebuild. Again, avoid Zerto Cloud Manager until the product matures.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We have seen an ROI. Otherwise, we wouldn't keep using it. The biggest thing is the number of VMs we can support with the staff that we have. 

The licensing is fair. We have an enterprise license in which Zerto gives us 20,000 licenses or something well above what they think we're going to sell for the year. Then all our customers pull from that pool and we resell the licenses. We may sell 50 licenses to a customer but at the start of their contract, they may only have 30 VMs ready for DR. We contract them for 50, but eventually, they'll get up to 50. So we don't have to go to the vendor and add and remove one license here or one license there all the time.

That part of it is easy, but we do have to license all of our sites once a year, which is a pain and all of our sites report to Zerto Analytics. I've been asking them for years since they started Zerto Analytics, why we can't just put our license key on analytics rather than logging into hundreds of sites and putting them in each site. That's a real beast. They definitely need to fix the part where the site licensing is terrible. As far as the licensing VMs to replicate, that's great.  In version 9, Zerto plans on deploying a license server to address this.

Zerto 9 is out and there is still no customer-deployable license server. We regularly have issues with customers who cannot reach the Zerto license server. They cut you off at the knees after 14 days! HP really needs to work on this process.

Commvault was one of the big ones we looked at. Commvault is much more complex and expensive. We also looked at AWS and Azure. We offer a wide range of solutions. 

Recently launched last year, Nutanix LEAP is primarily designed for people that use Nutanix, and not everybody does. Not everybody can use it. We also offer RecoverPoint for VMs. It is a Dell EMC product, so it's geared toward people that are running VxRail. And then there is vCloud Availability. You have to have vCloud Director on both sides and vCenter, which is not something that everybody has either. vCloud Availability monitoring is also a nightmare. Zerto is more the product of choice for most use cases. 

Some of the biggest problems that we've had as a cloud provider are the vCD integration and the Zerto Cloud Manager integration. If you can avoid those two things, avoid them.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. 

We use Zerto as a DR tool. Instead of having to have a duplicate DR server, we can add a system to BPG and point it to whatever our DR site will be and replicate it for customers.

We also use it for migration planning. If we need to move VMs from on-premise to Azure or back, or it was built in the wrong place, we can easily move it over. 

It reduced the time for DR tests from the infrastructure side. Being able to get our work done in a matter of a couple of minutes so the app teams can get to work and can do their testing has been significant. 

Before we would have to use a backup recovery tool to restore it to a LAN, which could take hours at times, depending on the solution that was being used. 

The replication features are most valuable. It's fast to set up a BPG and get a system added. This aspect is very important to our business. Being able to provide customers with a very fast DR experience, whether it's for a test or live case scenario, and being able to provide the ability to move systems to Azure for cost savings or migrations, saves our ops teams a lot of time.

We would love to have a native management pack for vROps and to be able to view a dashboard and metrics for BPGs within vROps. We would like to have a single view for monitoring and provide customers with dashboards so they can see their own BPGs. 

We would also like to have a native plugin for VRA built by either VMware or Zerto. That way there's actual support for it and we're not on the hook for trying to figure out what happened if it breaks.

We have been using Zerto for four years.

The only problems we've had stability-wise come from upgrades.

This is a scalable solution. The only challenge is that there's no way to manage it centrally at the moment. If you have 30 vCenters, you now have 30 appliances and you have to remember where everything is, which can become a pain point when it comes to trying to find where this VM is being replicated and what BPG it's in. 

The support for this solution could be improved. It is challenging for staff who actually understand the product. We had issues where we ended up spending hours and sometimes days on the phone, only for us to figure it out on our own.

They're very personable and fine to work with. It seems like technical expertise is lacking. I would rate them a five out of ten.

Neutral

I haven't used too many other disaster recovery tools. We used standard backup solutions and Zerto is significantly faster. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

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.

Positive

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 primarily use it for disaster recovery.

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.

In terms of ease of use, Zerto is better than SRM now because you can do automated VM protection. As long as you set it up, enable it, put the tags on the VMs, and have the template VPG created, it works. With SRM, we use array-based replication, so anytime a VM goes on a replicated data store and that replicated data store is in a protection group in SRM, it's automatically protected. So there's no intervention needed to protect that VM. Initially, the fact that I had to manually create the VPGs when a new VM came in was a con for me with Zerto when I was comparing it to SRM, but now, I'm happy with Zerto's automated VM protection. We currently use both Zerto and SRM in tandem.

If I had to manually create the VPGs, it could take thousands of minutes.

As far as the speed of recovery, Zerto is faster than SRM because, with SRM, we use array-based replication. This means that we have to shut down the machine, detach the data store, and attach it to the other side. All of this takes time. In Zerto, that doesn't happen because it's continuous, VM-level replication. So, the data is going right over to the other target data store. When we run the recovery on Zerto, we recover a VM in under 10 minutes, so the RTO is less than 10 minutes, as opposed to some SRM plans that can run an hour or two hours.

One issue we've been having with Zerto lately is the ability to go into maintenance mode during vSphere upgrades. It doesn't have the hook into the lifecycle manager of the bump. During vCenter or ESXi upgrades, it causes VCF to fail its pre-checks because the machine doesn't power off and go into maintenance mode. It's been an issue since version 7.5 and it's impacting a basic automation function in vSphere.

I've been using Zerto since 2018.

Zerto is pretty solid in terms of stability.

I'm sure it scales well. In our legacy environment, we only used a 100-pack license, so we only used 60 machines on that license. That was a fairly small footprint. In this new environment, we estimate at least a couple of thousand because we're shifting from SRM to Zerto. I expect it to scale well.

Zerto's technical support is better than that of most vendors that I deal with. I can open up a support ticket and have someone get back to me within a couple of hours. Even with a Severity 3 ticket, someone will email me within a couple of hours. I will rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup process is simple. You get the executable, you stand up a VM, you install it on a VM and open up firewalls, and connect the ZVM to the ZVRA data sites. It's fairly straightforward.

You can deploy Zerto in under two hours, as long as the firewall is in place. When the firewall is in place, everything runs smoothly. Otherwise, it takes a while.

I deployed it myself.

I do think that we've seen a return on investment. We started off with SRM in our legacy environment, and it was probably protecting 90% of the estate. Now, we have a new environment, and Zerto is now protecting 90% of the estate, and SRM is only doing 10% or even less than that.

It's a nice tool, and you should go for it. I don't think you'll be disappointed. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Zerto at ten.