Zerto Reviews

We've been using Zerto for data center migration, but we will begin using it for disaster recovery. Because of some data center issues, we're still using version 9.5. One of our data centers is at 6.5 and the other one is at 7, so we can't move any or upgrade to 10.

Zerto enables us to set the IPs and map everything out in our environment prior to migration. We can create VPGs and mass migrate applications, databases, and web clients. That was the selling point for us. The product is easy to use. We had a 30-minute onboarding process from our sales engineer, who showed us how to use it. 

We don't use near-synchronous replication yet. It will be essential when we start using Zerto for DR, but it isn't a big deal during our current migration. Once we have a DR site, it will be essential to have those time slots we can restore to in the event of malware and ransomware. 

Right now, if you have an error, it creates a link that takes you to a website to review information about the problem. It would be nice if Zerto could give you information within the app instead of referring you to a web application.

Zerto for two years.

Zerto is intuitive. We could set everything up in the environment within a day and a half and start migrating on the third day.

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10. 

I use Zerto for disaster recovery. 

The time it takes to fail a server over to DR has been great. We've seen a reduction in time spent. We can do it in minutes. Being able to go back to certain snapshots, to failover to another location, and then go back to specific snapshots is quite useful. We can roll back easily. 

The off-site replication is excellent. We have workloads that aren't DR-aware. Being able to replicate it to other data centers is great. We don't have another way to do it, currently. 

The near-synchronous replication is good. You get five-second data points. It's not something we advertise to our customers, the developers, however, we've had instances where we needed to go back two hours, prior to a file being deleted, and it's helped. 

We're protecting our VMs with Zerto. It's positively affected our RPOs. It meets the objective. It's the only way we can have a solution for certain applications where we send an entire application to another data server. 

It's a great product. There are a lot of features that it has that we don't use since we are on prem. We strictly use it for DR between our data centers. There are a lot of cloud plugins that they have that we don't use. Our use case is limited. It does everything we need it to.

I've been using the solution for probably four or five years. 

The stability of Zerto is good. We didn't have any issues. Our biggest challenge was trying to get to the clients and I was waiting on an upgrade path - from Windows to Linux. Now there is an upgrade path. Honestly, that has been the biggest challenge we've had for five years. 

The scalability of Zerto is good. You can easily protect other clusters and VRAs. It's very flexible.

Our current environment has 45 VRAs in each cluster. We have two replica pairs, two sites that mirror each other. 

In total, we have 70 ESX hosts.

Technical support is great. They've shown us many things about the manager that we didn't know about. Every time I call, I take notes. They are very knowledgeable and the knowledge-based articles on the site are also helpful. Even if I thought something was broken, they've always managed to fix it. 

Positive

We used to use VMware's SRM. With SRM, for us, it was overly complex. We used an array-based replication with SRM. We had issues where the storage team would go to do work on the array and they would fail the machine over and it wouldn't be right. We would have outages. Every time we did a failover it was a process and we would be missing rules.

This is not array-based and we can test our failover in a sandbox without taking the system down. 

The initial deployment was easy. We deployed VRAs to the host from the manager. It works very well. The amount of VRAs you have to deploy and the amount of time it takes is minimal. It took us about an hour. 

I can't speak to if the company has witnessed any ROI. 

I don't follow the licensing. It was bought for us and we use it. 

We evaluated SRM and a few others. I can't remember which ones we tested. We've been on Zerto since version six. 

The selling point for us, coming from SRM, is that SRM was tied to vCenter. We had to pay attention to versions and there were a lot of ways you had to make sure the versions were correct and it was overly complex for what we needed. We simply needed to replicate a virtual machine and that was it. Zerto stood out as it was easy.

I'd recommend the solution to others. I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

We primarily use it for DR, that is, for VM replication between two data centers, using it not only for replication but also for orchestration.

Zerto provided better overall DR coverage and more consistency.

I found VM level replication and being able to group the VM levels to be valuable. I like not having to worry about whether a particular VM is in the right storage group; some of those sorts of things would trip us up previously. 

It's a lot easier and more straightforward for a VM administrator because he can know that this VM goes in this group or gets this tag, for example, and that it's now in a DR group and is taken care of. I don't have to worry about all the backend details. It's just simplified.

In terms of ease of use, the benefit of Zerto over SRM is the fact that it doesn't rely on a secondary backend product, with having to have the right storage groups with RecoverPoint or something else with multi-tier architecture.

It's still too early to compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions. We've just started the DR tests to understand the time difference. However, from what I've seen so far, the speed of recovery is similar but more consistent with Zerto. We don't have situations where we've missed this or that.

Zerto reduced the staff involved in data recovery situations by a single person. Now, we don't have the backend storage person who has to keep an eye on it anymore. With a different solution, we would have needed two people.

There's one feature that SRM had that Zerto doesn't have, and it's one that we've been asking for. With the orchestration part of the failover, with our DR and our primary sites, the IP addresses are almost identical. The only difference is one octet. With SRM, we could say during a failover change. With Zerto, we keep hearing that it's coming, but we haven't received it yet. It's a feature that would be very beneficial. It would reduce the time a little bit more.

I've been working with Zerto for about two years.

The stability seems fine. I haven't seen any issues with it thus far.

For our organization, the scalability matched our needs. Between the data centers, we probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of 3,000 VMs.

From what I have seen, the technical support has been very good. They've been very responsive to my team.

We previously used SRM. Zerto is a little bit more mature, has a better feature set, and is more aligned with the features and functionalities that we need.

We have seen an ROI from the perspective of a reduction in hardware and a reduction in the number of people trying to focus on the tool sets.

It is less expensive than the full solution that we had previously, but at the same time, it's not an inexpensive product either.

We evaluated Cohesity and other solutions.

Overall, Zerto is a very good product for us, and I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

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.

Zerto is part of our disaster recovery plan. We have it set up in our main office and in a remote location in another state. We replicate all of our ERP data over to the replication site utilizing Zerto. In case there's a failure or a ransomware attack, or anything that we need to restore back to a point in time, in real time, Zerto covers those scenarios.

Being able to bring a virtual machine online in a test environment, look at it, make changes and then say, "Okay, we're done," and turn it off again, is pretty helpful for us. It has actually saved us a couple of times.

For example, we had an order that was put in by a customer but the entire order got deleted. There was no history of it and no way of retrieving what was on the order. So we actually spun up our production ERP system on our remote location, utilizing Zerto. We brought it online and restored it to the point of time when we knew the record was there, and made a screenshot of the record with all the line data included. Then we shut it back down. We were able to re-key the order and it worked out great.

With Zerto, our disaster recovery is probably the one piece that we know is reliable and available. The way Zerto works, and the way we are utilizing it as part of our disaster recovery solution, make our disaster recovery plan very easy to explain for us and to our auditors.

In addition, when we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people needed. A failback literally takes minutes to do, and one person can do it. We can either put it into production or just say, "Okay, we've got what we need." We'll just end it and go back to our normal production cycle. It's very easy and definitely decreases workload. There are no tapes to dig out or backups to sort through. You just grab the time you want and say, "Hey, put me back into this period and time," and it does it.

Zerto's continuous data protection is unmatched. It's phenomenal.

It's also very easy to use. The menus are self-explanatory. Once you understand the terminology of the product, what the VPGs (Virtual Protected Groups) are, you're able to pretty much do what you want in the product. It's very easy to use.

It took me a little bit of time to get used to Zerto's terminology and to relate it back to how you do a backup traditionally. It was a little different. It took a little while to understand what a VPG is and what it does. That's an area that they could probably improve on a little, making the documentation easier to understand.

I have been using Zerto for two and a half to three years.

The stability of Zerto is outstanding. It runs 24/7 and works as described. If there are any issues or any problems arise, we get notifications from Zerto, but that does not happen often. Usually, if there's an issue, it's related to something we've done, or because we need to increase a file size or job log. Other than that, it works the way it's supposed to.

Zerto covers 10 production machines in our environment, which is not a huge scale. We only have one replication site. We could easily add more replications if we wanted to. Zerto has that flexibility. But for us, a one-to-one replication to our Nashville location works perfectly for us.

I have had to call their technical support and they're very responsive. The issue is always resolved. I give them very high marks for their support.

Positive

We didn't have a solution that does what Zerto does.

The initial setup was very simple, very straightforward. Zerto got online with us when we did the initial configuration and gave us easy guidelines to follow. We were able to have it up and running in less than an hour.

We took what Zerto recommended in their deployment guide. We knew the areas we wanted to cover and what we wanted to improve upon. Based on those things, we were able to come up with a nice, easy plan to follow to get it implemented.

When there's an issue, just one person is involved, but generally speaking, there's not much maintenance on Zerto. Once you get it up and running, it does what it's supposed to do.

We have definitely seen return on our investment in Zerto. First, it's a time-saver. Second, for IT, it gives us peace of mind. We don't have to worry about it. 

One of the ways Zerto is really good in that regard is that you can actually bring your servers online in your test environment and see exactly what something would look like if you restored it. And if you don't want to restore it, you just hit "cancel" and it puts it back the way it was. It's great to be able to do that. The test features they have built into the product mean you can test a scenario like "What if I want to spin this up over here, how would it look?" You can do that.

Licensing Zerto was very simple. They had a product that fit our size and scale. It made it really easy to choose. 

As far as pricing goes again, we're a $150 million dollar company, meaning we're not a huge company but we're not a small one either. Zerto had the right pricing model that fit our budget, and they delivered on it.

Zerto was the leader in the category, and I'd used it in the past with another company, so we just went straight to Zerto. There was no need for a PoC with another product. We knew it would work for us.

My advice about Zerto would be "do it." The product is just that good. What it does is very impressive. And again, it gives you peace of mind, knowing your data is safe and secure and that it's replicating like it's supposed to. That's just a great feeling.

We don't do long-term retention currently due to how our backups are made. We use Zerto for anything less than a one-week window and we can revert back. 

Thankfully, we have not had to use Zerto for ransomware, but it would absolutely be a lifesaver should that scenario come up. Similarly, we haven't had a situation where we had to fully flip over to our DR environment. We have tested it, and it works great. Our recovery time would literally be 20 minutes and we'd be up and running in a brand new location, without missing a single record.

While Zerto hasn't necessarily changed the amount of staff involved in our overall backup and DR management, it has definitely made those tasks very easy. We set it up once and we don't have to worry about it anymore. It runs and does its thing. We don't have to babysit it or watch it or worry about it. It just works. For what we use it for, I don't see an area in which I would say, "Hey, add this feature or make this change." It works as described, right out-of-the-box.

Our primary use case is disaster recovery.

We have Zerto deployed on-premises at both our primary and DR locations.

In general, Zerto helps us with our DR plan because it makes things so easy.

Zerto does a very good job of providing continuous data protection. I've been very impressed and would rate it an eight out of ten. Especially when it comes to DR testing, it is very easy to work with and we are able to recover our infrastructure at our DR site within a matter of minutes.

When we have to failback or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people involved in the process. I've used other solutions and I haven't seen anything that compares to what it can do. It is difficult to estimate the exact time saving because it depends on the workload.

Realistically, you could have a single admin responsible for the restores, whereas with other solutions, depending on how big your environment is, it would take more people. In our environment, it would take upwards of five people to restore our core infrastructure and by using Zerto, it reduces the number of people by about half.

With respect to DR management, Zerto has reduced the number of people involved in the process. I wasn't at the company when they used the previous product, so I'm not sure by exactly how much.

The most valuable feature is real-time replication, where we have the ability to recover things in near real-time.

It's very helpful for DR testing because we can recover VMs in an isolated bubble and prove our DR methodology.

Zerto is very easy to use, which is one of its big selling points. It takes just a few clicks to restore a VM, which means that it's easy to train somebody to help in a DR situation.

We have had some issues with trying to get certain parts of the backup or restore functionality to work. However, I cannot recall the specific details.

I have been using Zerto since I started with the company two years ago. In total, the company has been using it for approximately four years.

The stability has been very good. I can't think of a time that we've really had any issues that we didn't cause or something maybe with an update. We're running it 24/7 and I can't think of a time that we've had any major issues with it.

From my perspective, Zerto's scalability is very good. We have 60 VPGs and 122 virtual machines that we're using Zerto to replicate to our disaster recovery site. This will grow with any new infrastructure that we build. Any new servers, depending on their RTO or how soon we need to recover them, would be put into Zerto. Potentially, we will add some, although I'm not aware of any major growth at this time.

Our operations department monitors the dashboard just to confirm that our RTO and the VPG health look good. There are perhaps five people in that team, who are watching the dashboard.

In my team, there are three of us that use it, although we don't look at it daily. It would only be if we get reports of an issue or we need to adjust a setting or something like that.

Overall, on a day-to-day basis, there are probably about five people that use it.

I have not personally dealt with the technical support but I know about the experience that my coworker has had. They are typically very helpful and provide good responses compared to other companies in the industry.

Zerto was recently acquired by HP and there is some concern in our organization about what might happen to the technical support, seeing as they were bought out by a bigger company. We're hoping that it doesn't negatively impact the support that we receive.

I have used Veeam in the past and it's similar to Zerto in certain aspects. They both have their pros and cons, but I would say from what I've seen, I like Zerto. It just seems to be a little bit more user-friendly in the UI. Functionality-wise, they're similar. I think Veeam would be one of their main competitors.

I have also used the older product by VMware called Site Replication Manager. It really doesn't compare to Zerto.

I have been involved in some of the Zerto setups and from what I have seen, they go very well. It seems that it is pretty easy to perform the initial setup.

It takes about an hour per site, or per server to upgrade it. 

We deploy and upgrade the solution in-house.

It's usually two people that are responsible for maintenance but it could be four people on the team.

I believe that we have seen a return on our investment. The return comes from time saved in manpower, for example. From what I've seen, it's worth the cost.

I've also heard comments from my coworkers to say that it's an expensive product but it definitely makes you feel more comfortable in a DR situation.

I have not been directly involved in the pricing and licensing. My understanding is that it's expensive but worth the price.

We don't use Zerto for long-term data retention and I'm not aware that there are any plans to do so. We use Zerto in tandem with our backup solution, just to be safe. That said, we have used Zerto for recovery in scenarios where we couldn't find the particular data that we were looking for in our other backup solution. 

We have not experienced any ransomware incidents or other situations where we needed disaster recovery. However, Zerto would definitely save us time for that. Depending on the situation, it could save the number of people involved as well.

Although we have not had to use it in an actual event, it helps us in terms of regulatory and audit compliance. If we had a real event, we would all feel more comfortable that we'd be able to restore or be in a better position to have our infrastructure restored in a small amount of time.

We have not yet looked into using Zerto for DR in the cloud but in the future, we're going to look at the option of doing so.

My advice for anybody who is considering Zerto is to do a proof of concept or a trial. I'm not sure what the vendor has available in this regard but I would advise trying it out with a small number of virtual machines.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery of our tier 1 applications from our primary data center to our secondary data center. We have also used Zerto to successfully perform server migrations from one site to another for data center moves and company acquisitions.

Our administrators love the product and it has been proven to be easier to use than VMware SRM which we were using before going with Zerto.

Zerto has given us the peace of mind to know that we have full DR protection for our critical applications.

Zerto is relatively easy to set up and administer.

We were able to create runbooks within Zerto to help with DR failovers, and testing DR failovers is pretty easy as well.

We used to use VMware SRM and it was very cumbersome to add in new virtual machines or storage volumes because they would basically "break" the SRM protection groups that were already out there. With Zerto, it takes on new additions to protection groups much easier and it saves our admins a lot of time having to care and feed it.

The most valuable feature of Zerto is its overall flexibility, where it can be used for standard DR or you can also use it for server migrations, data center consolidations, etc. You can also use it for data protection and physical to virtual migrations as well.

It is kind of a swiss-army knife.

I can't think of any major areas of improvement with Zerto. Make sure that they are building in cloud-friendly features in future releases because a lot of enterprises are starting to move workloads to the cloud and are seriously considering doing DR to the cloud as well. Our company may be moving in that direction also.

I wouldn't mind seeing Zerto sold at a cheaper price point, although the cost is comparable to VMware SRM.

We have been using Zerto for four Years.

Zerto has been rock solid for us in terms of stability.

The scalability of Zerto seems to be ok. This will depend on the size of your environment and how often you need your data replicated for BCP and SLAs.

Zerto customer service has been great so far. No complaints!

We used to use VMware SRM and we switched to Zerto because it is less expensive and easier to administer.

The initial setup of Zerto was very straight forward. The rest of the configuration will be as complex as your environment's DR needs and application stacks are.

We had an engineer from Zerto help us with the installation and initial configuration for thirty days.

It is good to do a full Disaster Recovery plan for your organization and doing a BCP plan as well. You need to figure out how many critical servers and applications you have in your environment so you will know how many Zerto licenses to buy, etc.

We only baked off VMware SRM and Zerto.

It is good to implement a proof of concept of Zerto to test it out. I highly recommend it for data center moves.

We use it for disaster recovery and analytics.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. We are also using it for our Virtual Protected Group or VPG.

By implementing Zerto, we wanted disaster management, especially for our data. We did not want to lose data unnecessarily.

Over time, I keep seeing different benefits of using Zerto.

In terms of ease of use, Zerto is easy to use.

Zerto has near synchronous replication. It is okay. It has been easy for me to use.

Zerto is faster than other recovery solutions for real-time automation.

Zerto makes it easy for me to navigate and move my data to the cloud. It has had a positive effect.

Zerto has helped reduce downtime. There is about 25% reduction.

Zerto has improved the data recovery time. It has saved me time. It is faster than what I was using before. Zerto has saved me a lot of time, but I do not have the metrics.

Zerto has helped reduce our organization's DR testing by 30%. It has had a positive effect on our IT resilience.

I like the automation of transferring data in the case of any disaster to our VMs. It is also easy to use and fast. 

Its price is a little bit on the higher side. Other than the pricing, I do not have any areas for improvement. I am enjoying Zerto. Everything is working the way I want it.

I have been using Zerto for the past two years.

Its stability is okay.

Its scalability is okay. As we keep having more customers, we might have to scale it, but for now, it is good.

I contacted them once, and I got a quick response. They are fast. I wrote to them, and I quickly got a response. The response was timely and effective.

Positive

I was using Microsoft Azure backup before. I migrated to Zerto. Zerto is faster.

It is deployed in the cloud. Its deployment was not too easy and also not difficult.

Like every other team, it took us some time to get it going. It is not as easy as one, two, and three. It took us about one hour to get it going. That is why it is not too easy, but it is also not difficult.

After installation, we took the entire day because we were trying to make sure everything worked fine.

So far, I have not done any maintenance for Zerto.

We had two people involved in its deployment.

Zerto is a little bit on the higher side in terms of pricing. It would be better if they had a pay-as-you-go package.

I got a review from a friend and decided to give it a try. She asked me to give it a try to see how I could recover data fast and do other things without wasting time. I was looking for these features, and I got them with Zerto.

I would advise knowing what you want in the software and why you are going for this software. If you want fast data recovery software, you should go for Zerto. I have been using Zerto for two years, and I have not had any reason for regret. New users who are going for Zerto would not regret their decision.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.