HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We primarily use Zerto Virtual Replication to protect groups of servers in our production data center, replicating them to a secondary site. We also protect essential test and dev servers.

I have also used it in a past role to carry out a datacenter migration project. 

The single pane of glass in Zerto Virtual Replication and ease of use is what makes Zerto different from other replication products that I have used in the past. You can clearly see if something is not quite right in your disaster recovery plan before you have an actual disaster.

Zerto has made Disaster Recover and Business Continuity Planning tests much easier and quicker. Even when doing 'Live' tests, we are able to confirm beforehand that everything looks OK. This means less time troubleshooting on the day of the test.

The product is improving all the time and I think the Zerto team have quite a good handle on things. I found the Local ZertoCON meetup/conference particularly useful to hear about different user cases. However, sometimes it feels like the QA is not great, as the previous two updates have been bug fixes.

It is easy to setup and manage.

Provides a simple interface for VM DR.

Needs compatibility with multi-tiered applications, such as Sharepoint, for testing.

One to two years.

No.

No.

Fair, depending on which location you get in contact with: They can be difficult to deal with and don't understand the product in which they are servicing.

Not applicable.

It is very straightforward. A simple wizard to install.

I didn't personally deal with the licensing structure.

You should evaluate Site Recovery Manager by VMware. It is more expensive, but works better.

Ensure you run an evaluation and test failovers to verify it will meet your individualized needs.

There are two main features which I consider to be the greatest value of the product: The ability to replicate without using snapshots and the journaling capabilities.

We have been able to implement a DRaaS product based on Zerto Virtual Replication.

Also, we have helped several customers implement their Disaster Recovery Plans more easily than before, thanks to the independence of hardware that the product provides.

Monitoring and integration, like a management pack for vRealize Operations Manager.

Around four years.

No, the product is very easy to install and very stable once setup is complete.

No, the product is very easy to scale and can support a large infrastructure.

Very good, they respond quickly and accurately.

Multiple solutions, and we switched because they all required snapshots.

Very straightforward, the installation and setup are very simple, and we even had assistance from technical support to accomplish it.

Honestly, I'm not well informed in terms of pricing and licensing. My interaction with the product is 100% technical, in terms of architecture, implementation, and operation.

Multiple solutions, like Veeam, VMware SRM + ABR.

It's very easy to set up a lab or a PoC to test it. I would recommend doing that because you will be able to see the real value of the product in a very short term.

• Journal: ZVR uses a journal of history changes. Whenever you need to failover a VM or group of VMs, you have the ability to choose a Point in Time to which those replicas should be switched. For instance, if a disaster occurs at 10:05:00, you can failover with replicas to 10:04:55.

• Consistency Groups: If you replicate groups of VMs, then during failover, all of the VMs in groups are failed over to the exact same point in time.

• Resiliency: ZVR is resilient to Zerto infrastructure component restarts and loss of connection between sites which are automatically handled. The ZVR is very lightweight it doesn't use snapshots and has close to zero impact on production VMs and many others. It lets you get your files from Windows based VMs without failing over to replica VMs.

Before ZVR, we had many limitations in case of protecting production VMs during working hours. This primarily came from frequent VM snapshots impacting users. ZVR lets us protect our VMs without any impact upon users and greatly improved our RPOs from hours to seconds.

I would like to see a couple of details regarding awareness of VM events coming outside of ZVR. This could be a user reverting VM back to an older snapshot, which can sometimes screw up the replica, but nothing major besides it is affected.

We have used this solution for over three years.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

ZVR can handle thousands of VMs, so there were issues with scalability here.

Support is very quick in their response time and most of issues are solved in a matter of hours.

We were using Veeam Replication which is based on snapshots. However, ZVR has no snaphosts, zero impact on production, and improves RPOs seamlessly.

The initial setup was very straightforward and can be done in less than one hour. You can then start replicating between two sites.

We did the implementation in-house.

Licensing is based on the number of VMs to replicate. The first thing should be to get the number of VMs to replicate based on your business needs.

Before ZVR, I evaluated Veeam Replication, vSphere Replication, and RecoverPoint for VMs.

If you need to replicate your VMs with RPOs of seconds, then Zerto is certainly the way to go.

There are many valuable features. However, the one that sticks out the most is the simplicity of the process to protect or migrate a virtual workload.

It enables protection of a virtual workload to be done by the app, whether single or multi-tiered, with a boot time scheduler. It is pretty awesome.

Zerto has changed how we think about protecting virtual workloads. It has enabled us to think about real time protection with full replication that provides checkpoints every few seconds and enables quick (< 10min) recovery times.

Zerto is solid. However, they are working on a cloud workload protection and protecting virtual workloads to more than one site. This is good stuff.

We have been using the product for more than two years.

Zerto is stable and works as expected.

Zerto scales as you scale your virtual environments. It simply and quickly protects virtual workloads.

Zerto’s support is good. They are quick to contact you back and get working on any issue. This is hard to get from other vendors.

I have been performing DR/migrations/replication for over 15 years. I changed during a bake-off of different products based on:

• Speed to setup and run
• Low to no dependencies
• Simple to use (easy to operationalize)

Zerto simply is the tool for protecting any virtual workload. I have set up and protected:

• DBs (DB2, SQL, Oracle)
• Many apps (Wintel and Linux)
• Virtual appliances.

It is extremely simple to set up and use.

The Zerto setup was straightforward. It is one of the simplest tools I have ever deployed to protect virtual workloads. It works hand in hand with VMware features such as DRS/HA, so there is no issue when your workload moves around.

Zerto’s licensing model has changed a bit over the last year and they are in alignment with others. It is pretty simple and more economical.

We evaluated PlateSpin, Recover Point/Recover Point 4 VMs, VMW SRM, Veeam, and VMW converter.

Put it in place as it will become your default tool for VM protection and replication, hands down!

The Clone Virtual Protection Group does not impact the production virtual protection group which is the most valuable feature.

Failing over the VM without removing/touching the production VM from inventory is also an important feature.

This product has a significant impact on moving the data center across various sites with perfection.

There is a need to allow the source vCenter Inventory to be imported with a single click.

What I meant by one click vCenter is that there is no current option to migrate a vCenter logical cluster as a whole. You can only migrate individual VMs only by adding them into a VPG (Virtual Protection Group). You can failover multiple VMs after adding them into VPG.

I have used this solution for over three years.

There were no stability issues, it is one of the most stable software out there.

There were no scalability issues, it is very simple and easy to deploy/scale.

The technical support is amazing, i.e., if you purchase the premium support. They respond within minutes, it is a very professional technical support team.

I have used a different solution. It was more complex and full of bugs, so that was the main reason that we switched to this product.

The setup was very straightforward. Anyone can do it!

Pricing depends on your future growth. Start small and then scale up.

We looked at another solution namely the VMware SRM solution, it is the recovery point for virtual machines.

Just buy it with eyes closed, no requirements are needed. It works with various VMware versions.

This is the most amazing hypervisor-based replication that I have ever used.

Replication at the hypervisor level. We’re a cloud Service Provider, and any solution relying on a specific storage vendor's functionality is a show stopper for us.

We can set up Disaster Recovery environments for our customers in a matter of minutes.

I hope that in the future the product will offer integrated encryption functionalities, so that the VPN setup between protected and protection site can become optional.

I've been using it for four years.

Assuming that you comply with the minimum requirements specified in their documentation, there should be no problems with deployment which is very straightforward.

We have never encountered problems with the stability.

Zerto scales very well.

10+

11 on a scale from 0 to 10, probably the best technical support amongst the vendors I'm working with.

Yes, complexity and cost.

Very straightforward and simple setup.

We always do the implementation in-house for our customers. The vendor always kindly provides one of their engineers to perform a post-installation check.

We sell on a per-use basis and pay using the same model.

When we started using the product, it was pretty unique. Since then, we have evaluated some competitors but still there’s no match.

After working with the product for about 6 months, the fact that you cannot only replicate virtual machines to another location, but the fact the you can group and configure various boot orders, with time delays is a valuable feature. There is also the ability to change the networking properties such as the IP and MAC addresses, DNS entries, and other options.

At this point we are not fully using the product for disaster recovery due to the fact we are not 100% virtualized. The hope is that within the next two years, it will greatly simplify our DR testing since there is a "failover test" option. This allows the systems to be brought up in an isolated bubble for testing. It will also allow all of the restores to be synchronized to the same time.

The one area I see a need for improvement is supposedly on the roadmap, which is to be able to replicate to multiple locations.

6 months.

No.

No.

No.

The account representative have always been helpful, even offering to get a product engineer on the phone to assist with configuration items if needed.

I have only had to contact technical support once and in that issue they responded very quickly and had the issued resolved with an hour.

There was a small RecoverPoint with SRM configuration, but it was difficult to manage and keep updated.

The deployment was very straight forward. A small plugin called a VRA is installed on each host. This keeps track of the virtual machines. Then, there is a dedicated virtual machine that runs the Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM). This is provides the web management interface and monitors the VRA's. This is also where all configuration and updates are performed. The menus do a great job in guiding you through the configuration of the protection groups.

The deployment was done in-house with the assistance of an implementation engineer over a web session.

An exact dollar ROI has not been calculated. The largest gain will be seen in man hours used for DR testing as well as the management of backups and recovery. This will turn what is now a very manual process into a fully automated recovery.

If you are planning on using this with a hyper-converged appliance running anything other than VMware, you may want to verify compatibility. On many of them, they are only compatible with VMware running, although they are adding other hypervisors. At the time of this writing, according to Zerto, they are not compatible with Simplivity at all.

No.