HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We have approximately 1500 to 2000 Hyper-V machines. Those Hyper-V machines are being used and converted to VMware. We use Zerto for our conversion from Hyper-V to VMware. We are also considering using it for DR purposes. 

Our prod environment runs on-premises and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. Our development runs on machines and hardware. In the event of a DR event, we would shut down dev and bring up our secondary copy of production. We hope that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that.

Zerto offered us massive time saving and consistency. We have a consistent outcome every time we complete conversions. We move from one platform to another with different loads being moved each time and Zerto's results are consistent each time.

We convert 30 to 50 VMs from Hyper-V to VMware on a nightly basis which has resulted in saving time as this is good throughput. Zerto also helped to reduce downtime. If we were to do this manually, we would have a lot of downtime to shut down those VMs on Hyper-V to be able to do the conversions.

The ease of the conversion moving from Hyper-V over to VMware is the primary reason why we chose Zerto and is its most valuable feature.

There has been one pain point that we have run into. We wanted to shut down the dev environment to focus on the prod environment. We couldn't find any option in Zerto to do that.

We have been using this solution since the start of 2022. 

This is a stable solution that offers consistent results. 

From a DR perspective, we use a few solutions. We have multi-site data centers in our environment along with Cohesity. We use Cohesity from a backup and DR perspective.

If you're in the middle of conversion between different platforms, regardless of if you're moving from on-premises to host it or from one environment to another, Zerto is agile and able to move your workloads into different environments pretty easily.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use Zerto for offsite replication.

I like how easy it is to run our DR tests with it.

In terms of ease of use, in the user interface it's very easy to tell the different virtual protection groups apart. It's easy to figure out where your virtual machines are and set different recovery IPs. It is a lot easier with Zerto than it was previously.

When you compare Zerto's ease of use versus that of the previous solution we used, Zerto has good documentation. That's probably what made it the easiest to install and configure, and have peace of mind that it's going to do what I expect it to do.

Every six months when I go through my audit, I don't have any stress about whether I'm going to pass any of my audit logs or any of the questions the auditors ask me. That is, I know I'm going to pass.

Zerto helped us reduce downtime.

Our disaster recovery test used to take quite a long time before we started to use Zerto. After we started using Zerto, the speed of the virtual machines' backup when they are going into test mode, is just so much quicker and so much more consistent. When we previously performed tests, we would need a block of about a week. Now, it's two days. The actual recovery portion is just a small part of that, but Zerto cut it in half easily.

I've been working with Zerto since 2019.

The stability is great; there's very little downtime. I don't have to worry that there will be a surprise update to one of the ZVRAs or the host that I have to contend with. We're given plenty of notice to plan ahead for an update. As far as losing service and downtime, we haven't had that happen.

We're a very small shop, but when we did expand to another group of servers that we were going to replicate, it was very easy to go in and just add another virtual protection group, add my virtual machines to it, and set my settings up and go.

We have less than a hundred virtual machines that we replicate.

The technical support staff I've had to interact with have certainly been some of the better ones. I feel that their turnaround time is always pretty fast and that you get reasonable support right off the bat. If my problem is a little more technical, then I may be transferred, but I don't find that to be an issue. I would rate technical support at nine on a scale from one to ten.

Positive

The initial setup was pretty straightforward for the site-to-site recovery or for setting up the VPGs. If you just want to do basic replication and you don't have a lot of special situations to account for, you could have it up and running very quickly.

For special situations, there are options within advanced settings. You don't have to dig too far for them, but they're not quite as straightforward.

We implemented it ourselves after reading through Zerto's best practices, etc.

If you want something that you can set and forget, Zerto is a solution you should look into. If I were to rate Zerto on a scale from one to ten, I'd give it a nine.

The primary use case is to migrate VMs. It's easier to use than HCX and SRM.

Zerto made our migration from different data centers very easy and very smooth. Zerto support and our account manager have always been there to help us out.

I found the very easy VPG setup, the easy recovery, and failover testing to be the most valuable features.

It's very user-friendly. You only need a couple of clicks, and it gets the job done. We also have SRM, but Zerto just requires a couple of clicks. You can test with Zerto, and you don't have to commit. So in terms of ease of use, Zerto is better. That's why we use it for migration.

In terms of reducing downtime, we don't actually have any because of seeding and mirroring. However, on the failover, it only takes two seconds of a blip.

Zerto's speed of recovery compared to that of others is great. It's incomparable, and the ease of use is always there.

Even though Zerto is for disaster recovery, it would be nice if it can also make backups.

I've been working with Zerto for three to four years.

It's very stable. They have bug fixes. If there's a problem, you can report it, and they immediately provide a solution.

Zerto's scalability is amazing. If they could do backups in the future, it would be better.

We're in a healthcare environment, so we have probably 30,000 VMs. We only have a couple of licenses, but that's probably going to grow in the near future. We're going to be using it in the cloud as well.

I would give technical support a nine out of ten. I'm taking away a point because, at times, they send emails for me to read when I need something done immediately.

Positive

We previously used SRM. We use Zerto because it is just easy to use. You don't need to set up a lot of stuff. You only need to set up one appliance on each site, and you're good to go.

The initial deployment is very straightforward. You just install the appliance, make sure that all the ports are working fine, test the connection, and you're done. If you have any problems, technical support is always there to help.

We had help from CDI for the initial deployment, and they were not bad. It was easy enough, but we had to use our credits. If it were not for the credits, we could have done it ourselves.

After the initial deployment, my team has been doing all the upgrades and any other setups.

We're down to a couple of data centers now, and our data center cost is going down. That is the ROI we have seen with Zerto.

The pricing is fair.

We evaluated SRM.

You don't have to evaluate Zerto; it just works. I would give it a ten out of ten;
I have no complaints.

We use it for our conversion from Hyper-V to VMware. The DR purposes are being looked into as well.

We've got about 1500 to 2000 Hyper-V machines. These Hyper-V machines are used and converted to VMware, and these are the two environments that we work with now, both on-premises and in a hosted environment.

The ease of the conversion, moving from Hyper-V over to VMware, has been the most valuable feature. It's the primary reason why we chose Zerto.

We've seen a massive benefit from using Zerto in terms of time savings and consistency. You see a consistent outcome every time you do the conversions. We're moving from one platform to another, but the payloads in what we're moving are different. We see consistent delivery.

Time savings-wise, I see anywhere from 30 to 50 VMs be converted from Hyper-V to VMware on a nightly basis. We've seen some pretty good throughput on the nights that we do conversions.

Zerto has absolutely helped to reduce downtime. If we were to do this manually, the amount of time that we would have to shut down the VMs on Hyper-V to be able to do the conversions and move them over to VMware would be massive.

That amount of downtime would cost our company a lot. We've got a team of three or four guys that do the labor. If you take what they're getting paid and you compound the amount of time that it would take to do the conversion, there would be a drastic cost in labor for those conversions.

Right now, our production environment runs on-premises, and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. However, our development runs on that hardware. In the case of a DR event, we would need to shut down development and bring up our secondary copy of production. We're hoping that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that.

Zerto is primarily being used this year.

We're getting consistent results, so the product seems to be very stable.

From a DR perspective, we use multiple different facets. We have multi-site data centers in our environment, along with Cohesity. We use Cohesity from a backup and DR perspective.

I was not involved in the initial setup but have heard feedback that those involved loved the simplicity of it.

We've absolutely seen an ROI in terms of time savings with respect to downtime. When you convert a couple of thousand machines from one platform to another, the amount of downtime that it would take itself would have paid for Zerto many times over.

We get our money's worth with Zerto.

If you're in the middle of a conversion between different platforms, regardless of whether you're moving from on-premises to hosted or from one environment to another, it seems to be very agile and able to move your workloads into different environments pretty easily. I would give Zerto a rating of nine out of ten.

We have three locations. We replicate circularly around all those locations for all our VMs. This is for DR.

We don't have to spend a whole lot of time worrying about DR and whether or not we are covered. Zerto just works. As it is replicating, we don't need to spend a whole lot of time with it. That is a huge benefit as far as daily management.

Luckily, we haven't actually had to do a full failover. We have tested it many times, and it proves out okay, but we don't have to spend a lot of time managing it.

Our insurance companies provide assistance with staff or boots on the ground. Whereas, using Zerto has allowed us to act very quickly with just our current team. We can fail over and switch over to our disaster recovery site, instead of having to bring in a bigger team.

It is amazingly simple to use, monitor, look at, and utilize. It is great for that.

We would like more mobile options. If we are at a restaurant or out and about in our normal daily lives, we would like to be able to interface via our mobiles.

I have been using it for about five years.

Scalability is simple. If you just add more virtual managers, then you are good to go.

Our customer rep, success manager, and engineer are great.

Luckily, I haven't had to use the technical support that often. The times that I have, it has been fantastic. They quickly had me where I needed to be, which is top-notch and good.

I would rate them as eight or nine out of 10. Nobody is perfect.

Positive

It gives us peace of mind. Before we had disaster recovery and long-term retention protection against ransomware, it was one of those things that kept us up at night.

We previously used VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) and Veeam for backup. Zerto is way better and more friendly. Zerto's interface, simplicity, and reliability are definitely better than SRM.

When we were using SRM, it didn't have a web interface. Zerto's web interface makes it easier to navigate. When we used SRM, it was an actual application. It was a bit clunkier and a lot more difficult to use. However, it has been awhile, so it might not be a fair comparison at this point.

The initial deployment was pretty simple. The implementation took less than half a day. It has been awhile, but it was very seamless, easy, and did not take very long. We were up and running pretty quickly.

Zerto was involved with the initial deployment. We paid for their Professional Services, who walked us through the whole thing. It was very simple.

Our technology committee established an RPO and RTO. We beat those times with Zerto. We have a 30-minute RTO and we can recover within seconds. We have far exceeded any expectations so far.

From the simple point of not having to worry about whether or not we are protected in the event of ransomware or disaster, it is worth the money.

The pricing seems fair.

We looked at other solutions around five years ago.

I would recommend buying it. It is easy and simple. It works. It is all the things that any administrator would want. You don't need to spend a lot of time messing with it and you can sleep at night.

I would rate this solution as eight out of 10 because nothing is perfect.

We use it for DR and general backup. We have snapshots or shadow copies with Microsoft and we do Zerto backups to our other locations so we can always get the data back.

We bought Zerto, in the beginning, to migrate a very important system of the airline from a co-lo that was managed by the co-lo to our on-prem. As an airline, you can't be down because you could cause a ground stop. With Zerto, we were able to migrate all those things across to on-prem without touching anything or losing any time. We took very little downtime.

Also, we've run into some situations where, for some reason, Windows has lost some of the files. I have been able to fail it over to our other data center and they were back up in 10 minutes.

The speed of recovery with Zerto versus other disaster recovery solutions is vastly better. Whereas with the others, I'd have to spin through a lot of stuff and find things, with Zerto I can scroll back in the GUI, find the one I want, and restore it. If that's not right, I can destroy it and go back a little bit more in time.

And our being an ultra-low-cost airline, we don't have staff, so it helps in that way.

It has also helped our DR testing because we can fail over the main part that runs the airline within 45 minutes. The first time, it took me an hour and a half. The second time, it took about an hour. The last time I did it, it took about 45 minutes. That's within the timeframe of one hour where we don't have to do a ground stop.

Moving the VPGs from one location to another is a valuable feature. You just click on it and move it and it's done. We have a stretch VLAN between our data centers so it's really easy: this is IP here and the same IP is there. So if something happens or somebody wants to test something, I can fail it over.

Another aspect that I use a lot is that I can fail it over into its own little bubble and I can install software that I want to test to make sure it doesn't break something. I can do that and then roll it all back.

If there is a mass of changes to a server, Zerto will restart the replication. It would be nice to know why that happens. 

The other thing that I've run into lately is that when I've done a whole bunch of upgrades to systems, so they're offline, they get stuck in a pending state. You can never get them out so you have to delete and start all over again. It would be nice if they could make it a little simpler to figure out what's wrong.

I have been using Zerto for about six years.

It always just runs. I don't have to worry about it or keep checking it. It just does its thing.

It's very scalable. Fortunately, we bought a bunch of licenses when we first bought it and we've been growing into those licenses over the years. It has been very scalable for us.

The technical support has been good, although I've had a couple of situations where they've said some things that were totally inaccurate. But you have that in all organizations.

Positive

Since I started with this airline, we have gone through two other solutions. Zerto is the third and we've stuck with it for quite a few years.

One of the other solutions was a direct product that dumped everything to a storage area in the cloud and it never was consistent. The other was a Dell application backup that no longer exists. That was just too limiting and its backup was never consistent.

Zerto is much easier to use. Once you get the concept down of what it's doing, it's really easy to bring up backups, restore backups, move things around, and test things. It's very easy.

I had one of their sales reps in Colorado help me through the setup. Then we just took it over.

The ROI is in "funny money." It's my time and how long something is down or how long it takes somebody to restore something, and that is much faster.

The pricing seems really good. We're an enterprise customer, so we get all the bells and whistles.

We evaluated a couple of things, but one of our co-los was actually using Zerto so we looked at it as a result. That is what led us to buy it.

We use it for disaster recovery, by replicating to our DR data center.

It has simplified our disaster recovery plan. With VMware SRM it was a little bit more complex. Zerto adds more granularity, but not at the expense of complexity.

The most important features are the 

• simplicity of recovery 
• wider capabilities and feature sets than SRM has.

I have been using Zerto for about three years.

We've been using it since version 7. Since then, it's gotten better and better. We've had some bad experiences with DR tests where everything went sideways and we had to restore a bunch of VPGs or recreate them. It seems like those situations are happening less and less as the product develops.

We have 1,200 seats and we have about 1,000 VMs that are replicated. So far, scalability hasn't really been an issue. We haven't run into a problem scaling it out.

I haven't been a super big fan of the support area. The support could really be better in terms of responsiveness. I've had some issues that took two or three days to get resolved. Once I got to the right person, they were resolved quickly, but it took a while to get to that person.

On a scale of one to 10, today I would rate their support at about a seven. If you had asked me two years ago, I would have rated it at three.

Neutral

We were an SRM customer and moved to Zerto. We had issues with SRM and I think we had some issues with Zerto initially. We've had it for three years and we've gone through several revisions. With every revision, it seems to get better. They keep adding feature sets.

SRM and Zerto are really the primary competitors. We like the fact that Zerto does VM-based replication instead of having to involve storage-based replication. You can just point to an instance of it and say, "Replicate to this DR data center," whereas SRM is a little bit more complex in that context.

The speed of recovery between Zerto and SRM is similar. With the later versions of Zerto, the recovery speed has become a little bit faster.

It's very straightforward to set up. You just install the software and point it at your vCenter. There are not really a lot of overly complex parts to the installation. It installs relatively easily and quickly.

We did it ourselves.

We haven't seen ROI because we've not ever had to recover anything. But in an instance where we would have to recover from a disaster, we would definitely see ROI. It's like paying for insurance. You don't really see any value in it until you need it.

The licensing is a little bit steep, but there is some value that you do get for it as well.

In our usage, Zerto has not helped to reduce downtime or the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. It also hasn't reduced our DR testing. We do a DR test regularly and that is about the same as it was.

I don't have any advice, but I would absolutely recommend it. The simplicity of how they have laid out the VPG structure, and being able to separate those out into groups, as opposed to SRM where you're replicating everything, seems like it's really well designed.

We work in a public safety environment and we use Zerto for disaster recovery.

It allowed us to migrate very quickly from our old environment to the new environment that we're building out. We were able to move the entire environment over to our new VMware 7 environment within a matter of hours.

Because we work in a public safety environment, we can't have downtime. We've had a couple of situations where we had to do some firmware upgrades. We would fail over to the DR site and Zerto helped us get back up really quickly. It was fast.

We set it up strictly for DR so that we can fail over and do a test failover without causing any problems.

And from the standpoint of ease of use, Zerto is a third faster for recovery compared to other solutions.

The ease of use is one of the best features. Previously, we were using Site Replication Manager with VMware and it was a little bit cumbersome. With Zerto, we liked the fact that it was hardware-agnostic and we were able to spin it up pretty quickly and get it working.

We had a situation where we had to relicense VMs once they were moved over. We later found out that that feature is built-in, but it's not easy to find. The way it's done is that you have to go to the target site to turn it on. If that were explained a little bit better up front, that would be helpful.

I have been using Zerto for four or five years.

It seems to be very stable. We haven't had any problems.

My counterpart is the person who takes care of this side of things, but from what I've heard, he's had really good luck with their tech support.

We used VMware's SRM. That old solution was a little bit cumbersome and Zerto seemed to be easier to use. It was more straightforward. It was much quicker to set up and the day-to-day use is easier.

I was involved on the VMware side, getting things ready for Zerto. My counterpart was the one who actually implemented Zerto. I believe the Zerto implementation was pretty straightforward. The only complexity involved was learning how it worked.

I've used it for a temporary migration. We had to shut down a data center and we moved some database servers over to a disaster recovery site. We then did the maintenance at the data center and brought them back.

We're using it only for on-prem and we use it to replicate from our onsite data center to a co-location, but there is a fiber connection between the two, so it isn't an internet-based replication.

In that migration instance we had six terabytes of data that we needed to protect and bring online quickly. We had a replication going and we made the protection group switch and brought the systems back within less than 30 minutes. It reduced our downtime on some critical applications.

If we hadn't used Zerto, we would have had to vMotion them to the other side and that could have taken hours. That could also potentially have been unreliable because there's a timeout period when vMotion works. We used Zerto to be safe.

It is pretty simple to use.

Whenever we do a failover, there's a confirmation box that shows up later. It's a little hard to see sometimes. We'll do the failover and some preparation activities and then there's a checkbox you need to check to continue and sometimes it's small, in the corner, depending on which screen you're using. A popup to continue would be a little bit better because then you're not sitting and waiting for something and it's already there.

We also had an issue with a misnamed network. They should make that a little more apparent when it's not available on the destination side. We were able to go all the way through with it, but when we did the recovery, it wasn't available. A pre-check to say, "Hey, it's not available. What network do you want to use?" would be helpful.

I have been using Zerto for about a month because I'm new with my current company.

The stability has been alright. We have failed over quite a number of machines.

We did have an issue with one failover. It didn't fail over completely. You really don't want to have to contact support in those situations, but we had to. It could have been an issue on our side as opposed to something being wrong with the configuration. I don't know what happened, but they got it working.

We had to call support during that migration because one of the settings wasn't correct. I don't know exactly what went wrong, but we had to create a ticket. Zerto got back to us within an hour, so we were really impressed with the support from them. It was really good. They got us taken care of pretty fast and we were back online during the process, within an hour. They were quick to respond after we submitted the ticket and then they got it fixed. There's not really much more they could have done in that situation.

Positive

We use VMware-native as well as Zerto. It's all circumstantial, based on sites. Some sites ended up getting an SRM license, so we have kept them instead of wasting licenses. And some sites use Zerto. Maybe down the road we'll pick one of the products, but for now, we use both.

Zerto was already there when I stepped into the picture. I helped initiate some of the disaster recovery processes. Based on what I saw from the outside, it was easy because it was ready for that situation quickly. It was ready in a business day or less, aside from the replication aspect or the data sync from when you first set up the jobs. But the basic setup to get things going was ready within less than a business day.

I would think we have seen return on the investment in Zerto because we use it a decent amount of the time. We have reduced the downtime within the last month because of it as well.

We've used SRM from VMware. Personally, I prefer Zerto because it's a little more automated. VMware has more requirements and VMware tools get us stuck sometimes. If the VMware tools aren't working on a virtual machine, it won't replicate over as quickly or start up as quickly because it's waiting for that service. You have to do custom settings to avoid that. Zerto doesn't have that requirement. It's a little more click-and-go versus click-and-monitor and then trace back and see what went wrong.

Zerto is also probably faster because SRM waits for VMware tools to come up and say, "Hey, we're here." That's not a requirement that I know of, with Zerto. Maybe it is. I'm a newer user of the product.

In terms of the number of staff involved in data recovery situations, Zerto hasn't really reduced that. My team generally handles those situations and it's the same number of people, regardless of which product we're using.

Zerto worked and did its job and it was easy to use. My team liked it, and the database administrators, who were the customers in that instance where we did the temporary migration, appreciated it.

I would rate it at eight out 10. Sometimes the interface can be a little tricky. If you're using a disaster recovery application, you're in a stressful situation already. Sometimes there are a lot of confirmations you have to go through just to start the Virtual Protection Group, and then it starts and you have to confirm again a few minutes later. You're stressed out. You're talking via chats with a bunch of people and there were times where that prompt was probably sitting there for minutes, which cost money.

More confirmations upfront and removing that second one later on in the process would be good, or a popup, instead of it being a small checkbox in the corner of the screen, is my recommendation.

We are mainly using it for DR and, in a few use cases, we leverage it for migration as well. It really fits our use cases.

The experience has been smooth when it comes to DR testing, as it has reduced the testing we need to do. 

Some of the most valuable features are the synchronous replication and migration with RDMs. I really like the conversion of RDM VMs for migration. It is very simple to use and fast. We haven't run into any issues.

If we have multiple VMs in a VPG (Virtual Protected Group) and one VM is hung for DR, it holds things up. The only alternative is to create multiple VPGs. It would be nice to have one VPG where, if one VM is failing, it does not impact the overall process.

We have been using Zerto for close to a year.

Our experience with Zerto has been good, but I don't know if we have actually saved a ton of time with it. There have been no issues or real challenges so far. We just recently adopted and started using it, so in terms of implementation of real use cases, it has barely been a couple of months. We haven't even done a single upgrade of it yet.

The stability is good.

We right-sized initially and we have not had to scale up yet.

I haven't had to engage support. One of my colleagues handles that. But I have heard no complaints about support.

We have a VMware product, SRM, and we use it in a few data centers around the globe. We started using Zerto in a few locations and, in other locations, we still have other products being used.

We were using SRM in our data centers and what happened was that we had a merger. In that process, the other party already owned some Zerto licenses. That's when we got our hands on it and started looking at it. We figured Zerto would be a better fit for our European data centers. We ended up using Zerto there and then got more licenses so that we could use Zerto more.

We have one other solution that we use for live migrations, VMware HCX, rather than Zerto. But we were not always able to use that. That's where the delta for those VMs is, and why we use Zerto for migrations.

The speed of recovery of Zerto is right up there compared with other solutions. It's good, no complaints in that respect.

Compared to other solutions, Zerto is very straightforward and simple to use. The preparation for DR is fairly straightforward, and the deployment is not very complicated.

Zerto hasn't cut the number of staff involved in data recovery, for us. We had one engineer doing it before and he continues to do it. He wears multiple hats. You cannot go down to less than one engineer.