Zerto Reviews

Our primary use cases were designed around backing up and being able to restore our management plan. This isn't something used for our department users. It is specifically for our infrastructure, things like vCenter, vRealize Operations—all those things that we still have to maintain. We wanted something a little more granular than just a standard backup. We needed to be able to say, "Rollback half an hour or an hour," as opposed to following the backup schedule that the larger backup system provided.

We're using it for migration. Zerto plays a large role in helping us move away from Hyper-V into VMware. We're talking about multiple departments that had to transition their applications and Zerto gave us an opportunity to do it in a much less painful way.

Another key benefit is that our response time has significantly decreased. We're no longer having to rely on the traditional process where you manually execute a backup and hope to God it works okay. And then, you have to run through whatever changes are necessary and cross your fingers that, if you have to restore, it will come back. We don't have that problem with Zerto.

The solution has also helped to reduce downtime for us, absolutely. In most cases, we are able to use Zerto as a momentary backup, run an upgrade or installation, and see whether or not we're going to succeed. We can potentially back it out without anybody knowing about it because it's still within our maintenance window. We never exceed that rather limited time period. That's very helpful. With our existing backup, more likely than not we're rolling into days at a time if something fails. So if our maintenance window was on the weekend, it would roll into the production week and cut into the week by a few days. That would be very problematic.

And the recovery speed is basically as fast as the speed of our pipe, and that's what makes it great. As long as our pipes are fast, we don't have to worry. We can roll in, roll out, or potentially roll back if we have to, within a really small window of time.

In addition, it has definitely reduced the number of operational groups involved in backups. Zerto is not managed by our storage team. It is managed by the team I'm on, which is infrastructure. Because of that, it's all internal to us on the infrastructure team. We don't have to go outside of our team to coordinate with others.

There are several valuable features because of the way we use it. The backup and restore features are definitely indispensable.

There are certain things about the user interface that could be a little bit more user-friendly. But it really depends on the audience. If we are using it as a technical tool, our team is the audience and we are able to utilize it. But if we were to pass this on to, let's say, the department users, that would become a little problematic. I'm wondering whether or not we can actually expand our offering to those department users. That may be a question.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

As long as our infrastructure is stable, it's stable.

All I have to do is add managers out there and it expands. What it boils down to is that my infrastructure has to be able to support it. I have to have space where I can send the backups to. As long as that exists, we're fine.

The customer support is pretty good. The bottom line is that the customer service is responsive, whether we're talking about technical challenges or even licensing challenges. They've been very helpful in both ways.

Positive

We played a little bit with Veeam, but for the most part, we relied on our storage team to provide us with backups. We switched to Zerto because that team wasn't able to deliver in a timely fashion and they weren't able to guarantee restorability.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. We have an individual who is our infrastructure expert. He took it upon himself to try it out. He told us what he found out when he did that trial and we started playing with it a little bit more and saw how easy it was to use.

I don't want to create upward pressure on their pricing plan, but the pricing is good. It's affordable.

The amount we had to set aside for our existing backup solution, compared to Zerto, was astronomical. The way Zerto works, it is so easy to scale up and out. It's not going to end up creating undue pushback as far as the cost goes.

We evaluated other solutions, with Veeam being one of them.

There's a lot about Veeam that we only just touched the tip of. I can't say with a lot of certainty what specific features Veeam may have. But there's a reason that we only touched the tip of Veeam and jumped over to Zerto.

One of the things that brought us to Zerto was talking to some of the folks that were here, at VMware Explore, years back, about what Zerto did, how it did it, and where it got its origins. That told us it was something that was definitely pretty solid and worth trying. I have to admit that, after trying it, it hasn't disappointed.

Leaving Veeam aside and comparing Zerto with our existing backup functionality, forget it. The two solutions are night and day. There is no comparison whatsoever. There is a lot of overhead with our existing backup feature that we just don't have with Zerto. We definitely have an easier time managing and controlling it. Zerto is definitely easier to use than our existing backup function.

One of the things that I'm finding with Zerto is that we're discovering new uses every day. As we continue to explore what Zerto can do, we haven't even gotten to the point where we say, "We wish it could do X." I'm not quite sure how Zerto interacts with cloud as a target, right now. That's something I need to learn. That's not necessarily a fault of Zerto, it's just me not knowing it yet.

We primarily use the solution for continuous data protection and cloud onboarding.

The analytic tools are great. 

The external API is something we're using quite a lot. It was upgraded, however, we still haven't upgraded to nine. We were starting to work at six, then seven, then eight, and now we are at eight of five updates. We've been working with this product quite a lot, and they have constantly added a few features. The long-term journal is one feature that is useful in that it allows us to use the product as both CDP and backup. You don't need the backup and disaster recovery tool. That's lowered the overall maintenance and operational costs. The OPEX gets reduced, once you use these two products. 

They have reasonable support. The Zerto university for training staff is very useful. It's very easy to get people on board and to get technicians to work and be familiar with the product. The virtual labs are very useful. You have a sandbox and you can easily play and try the product.

Unlike other products that split the VPG into protection plans and activation plans, they're doing everything within the same location. 

Technical support is good.

It's a very stable solution.

They could improve their online documentation.

From a reliability perspective, the product is around seven. It's less reliable than, others for example. They have one limitation when they have a virtual protection group that does everything.

From the ease of deployment perspective, it requires expertise and time. It's not very easy to do auto-tagging or to run multiple VPG genes at the same time. So, from multi-tenant or multi-complex scenarios such as using Zerto external products, such as firewalls, while their own product is good, it's part of a larger ecosystem, that still has a long way to go.

The triggering of external products could be better. Combining a master runbook and not just a single VPG or splitting the protection group from the activation plan could be better. There will be a protection policy and activation policy as being done in other products. 

Better tagging and better multi-term support are needed. Currently, there is no tenant admin support, only global admin support. They should work at the tenant level instead of the global admin level.

Right now it's an HPE product; they're no longer a startup. We are hoping that being bought by a major company will do good for them and they'll fix what needs to be fixed. There were very good products, to begin with, and HPE should work to make it even better.

We've been using the solution for the last three years at this point. 

The stability of the product is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable and the performance is good.

Technical support has been great. We are happy with the level of support.

We use both on-premises and cloud deployments. In terms of the cloud we are using, we are using Azure. We are using our own Cloud provider; we are using VMware Cloud Director.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We are happy with its capabilities. They are a very good product, however, they are not perfect just yet.

Zerto is our primary means of failing over our critical production loads that have a relatively low RPO/RTO. This is our use case for this solution.

What we like best about Zerto is its fast failover to another data center. It is simple and it works.

The limitation with Zerto is that you're required to have one Zerto Manager per virtual center, and this means that we're only able to replicate one way using this solution. Now, we are evaluating the clustering of Zerto with Microsoft clustering, so we can replicate both ways and both data centers, and have the management server in both data centers.

Historically, Zerto has started going into the backup space, and that is when they lost focus on keeping their replication product good. Now, it seems they're finally leaving that backup space, and they're just sticking with replication, so in version 9, they have fixed all of my gripes about the product, e.g. they now support VMware tags, Windows bringing over the time on the target side, etc. All of these little things, they are all correcting, because they're now sticking with the replication product.

It's been five years since I started using Zerto.

Zerto is a single use case product and it works flawlessly. It is stable.

Technical support for this product was absolutely fantastic, but that was before they were acquired by HP. They are still good, but I can tell the company is becoming too big.

We didn't previously use a different solution, as this was the first use case or first requirement that we needed to have under a 24-hour RPO/RTO.

The setup for Zerto was very simple.

We implemented this solution in-house. Implementation only took less than a day to complete. Zerto was ready to use in our environment for a DR (disaster recovery) exercise weeks later.

The return on investment from Zerto was immediate. Instead of having legacy DR failover exercises that involved multiple teams and weekends work of activity, now a single user can fail over everything and get reports to prove that it was failed over and the data integrity was all done. As far as people hours and time, the ROI was instant.

Zerto is fairly expensive. We are on a perpetual three-year subscription, but for my less than 300 VMs that we needed this functionality for, it is worth it. I'm not aware of any additional costs beyond the standard fees for this product.

We did evaluate Commvault LiveSync, Veeam, and Dell solutions, though I don't even remember what the Dell product was. We did go through RFP. We went with Zerto because it was simple and it worked, and we didn't have to worry about doing anything else.

We're a Commvault and Zerto customer.

We are on Zerto 8.5, and we are evaluating version 9 update 3.

I have no impression on the scalability of this solution, because we haven't really grown yet. We have 300 endpoints and we've always been in that range. I can't tell how Zerto fares if there's more than 300 endpoints.

We have a primary asset owner who uses this solution, who gets feedback from other IT infrastructure teams of whether their servers need to have a low RPO/RTO. That single asset owner will then put those in Zerto. For deployment and maintenance, we have the primary asset owner, then there's a backup person. The primary asset owner does everything, but if the asset owner isn't available, the backup person will help with support roles.

We don't have plans of increasing Zerto usage, as we've always had a relatively static critical VM count of around 300, e.g. we've gone down to 260, we've gone up to 300, but it's always in a range that's close to 300.

My advice to people looking into implementing this product is that if you have less than a 24-hour RPO/RTO and you need it to work in your target location, then there's no other product for it other than Zerto.

My rating for Zerto is a nine out of ten, because nothing is perfect. Nine is the best rating I could give for this solution, but the key takeaway is that it is a single use case product and it does the job.

We have servers in Houston and we have servers at a DR site, we need to be able to make sure that they're replicated in some form or fashion. That's what we use Zerto for, to replicate between our primary site and our DR site.

The biggest improvement for us was going from a possible 24-hour lag on our backups to real-time lag. With the hurricanes here in Houston, buildings losing power, and so on, it was nice having the ability to just go flip a switch and we're live with current data as opposed to we're live with what happened yesterday.

Zerto has helped to decrease the number of people involved when we need to failback workloads. It's a much smaller number. It's time-consuming because of the way it works, but it's not overly overbearing. Instead of taking a better part of the day or two to get everything up and running, it really only takes us three or four hours. It has also decreased the number of people we need. It would take three or four of us to bring up servers, make sure they're all running, test them, and all that stuff. Now, it takes one person to bring them all up and then there's a couple of us to test it, so we have half or less of what it used to take. 

We've never had a ransomware issue. The reasons for our failover has typically been natural disaster caused.

Pretty much all of the features are valuable. The biggest thing we use it for is replication, so the ability to set up our virtual server, set it to replicate, and Zerto handling everything else is the biggest feature that we like.

The continuous data protection is great. We love it because we can see exactly how many seconds behind real-time we are, which is usually under 10 seconds. It keeps things up to date. We love the product.

We currently don't use it for long-term retention. It's something we may look at in the future, but that's not the product we're using for that.

Zerto is very easy to use once everything's set up, which isn't difficult. It takes a little bit of time to make sure all the network stuff is all set up properly, but once everything's set up, using it day to day is very simple.

Zerto has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. Our DR is to a physical data center. We don't put our data in the cloud.

For what we got it for, it does it great. I use a different solution for my disk-to-disk local backups to where I can have a local backup of files. I don't think Zerto does that well to where it keeps a memory of the files that are there. Basically, when something is deleted on Zerto, it gets deleted on the replicated version. So, some sort of snapshotting or something where I could have backups at different points in time of files would be a really helpful tool.

We have been using Zerto for five years. 

Stability is great. The only downtime we have is during upgrades and patches. I really haven't had any problems with the platform or stability.

The time it takes to update or patch depends on the size of the patch. Major upgrades take a little bit longer, but I mean, it's typically a couple of hours at the most. It's not a huge thing.

Scalability has been great. It continues to grow as we grow. I haven't had any problems with it.

Zerto is being used 100% across our environment. 

We've got about 11 servers doing backups in the 20 to 25 terabyte range most of the time.

Only I work with Zerto in my company. 

The two times that we've contacted technical support, we didn't have any problems. They've been helpful. They made sure we got the issue resolved and did very well with it.

We previously used Veeam. We switched because of real-time backups. Veeam was a point-in-time backup. We said, "You're going to back up at this time." It took a snapshot and backed it up. Zerto just continually backs it up and makes sure that we're currently up to date and matching the server at your primary.

We use Zerto primarily for disaster recovery to the DR site. We still use Veeam for our backup disk-to-disk local for file backups.

Once Zerto is set up and running it is much more hands-off. You don't really have to do anything. You just log in to check, make sure everything's going well, and you're pretty much done. With Veeam, I feel like I have to check in a little bit more often, make sure the backups are running properly, making sure all the files are there, and everything like that. There is a little bit more checking to do on a regular basis.

I don't know if we would have failed over with Veeam because of the amount of time it took and coming back online at the primary site. I don't know that we would have failed over, which would have been probably five or six days of downtime. If we had failed over, we'd probably have lost two or three days in one direction, and probably another two or three days coming back to the primary.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. It took a little while to make sure we had everything connected right, and that it was going to the right place, but it's no more difficult than any other setup for something like this. I didn't find it difficult at all.

If you don't include seeding and you only include the setup and deployment, it only took us a day or two of planning and then another day of actually implementing it. The seeding took a while, but that's to be expected.

In terms of our implementation strategy, we were using a different product back then, which wasn't as up to date and live. We were just backing up at night, so we had a nightly snapshot that was being transferred to our DR site. Our strategy with Zerto was to get us to more of a real-time backup solution at the DR site and make sure everything was good. That was the entire purpose of going with Zerto.

We used a third-party integrator for the deployment. We used Centre Technologies and they were great. We've used them for other stuff and we didn't have any problems with it and never have.

The one time we had the failover and run at the DR site, instead of having two or three days of downtime, we really had less than one day of downtime. If you measure that in how much money we were able to make that day, it's around $200,000 to $300,000.

We are on the lowest license because we don't exceed the number of servers for the base license, so I don't have a lot of information about licensing. The price of it was comparable, if not better than what we were paying for Veeam. I have no problem with the pricing at all.

There are no additional costs to the standard licensing. 

Make sure you know how long it's going to take to do your initial seeding. If you've got a lot of data, and you're doing it over a pretty good distance, just make sure your pipe is big enough for the initial seeding. Once the seeding's done, pipe size doesn't matter, but the initial seeding can take a good amount of time over a small-ish pipe if you're replicating a lot of data.

For our largest servers to seed can take a full week or to 10 days for one server, for our large file server to seed is about seven terabytes, but we don't have a huge pipe at our DR site. We negotiated to increase the pipe size temporarily while we were doing the seeding, and that reduced the time drastically on how long it took to seed. I can't really give a number or what to look for. I would just have that conversation with Zerto about how long a certain pipe is going to take. How long is it going to take to seed using whatever pipe size based on the amount of data that they have.

Make sure all of your notifications are set up well when it fails. It takes a little tweaking and making sure that everything is set up right, but when you want to make sure you're notified if you get outside your SLA on how long the backups are trailing, making sure all that's set up properly is key.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

The primary use case for Zerto in my company is to manage disaster recovery.

My organization has experienced the benefits of using the tool, which include the ability to test our disaster recovery quickly.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the constant synchronization, ensuring that we have the most up-to-date information should a disaster occur and we need to handle failovers.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is why we first acquired the product.

Zerto's overall effect on our RPOs is such that it improves them significantly, and it is the reason why we purchased the product. Rather than having to recover from backup, which is time-consuming, it is available instantly.

If I compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions, Zerto is at least five times faster than other products.

It turns out that my organization has not been using all the capabilities of Zerto and we just found from the session, HPE Discover'24, that the things we were looking for already existed within Zerto. I don't have anything to ask for improvement in Zerto.

I don't want any additional features in the product as I would be busy employing the functionalities I recently found out are available in the solution.

I have been using Zerto for seven years.

The tool is very stable.

The scalability is fine for our company. We are a relatively small organization, but it has done everything we needed.

The solution's technical support has been solid and very good, and we hope it stays that way under HPE.

In our company, we would recover from our backup software, so things depended on whatever backup tool was used at the time.

When it comes to the product's initial setup phase, Zerto's support has been very strong and relatively straightforward.

I have experienced a return on investment from the use of Zerto. The exercises associated with disaster recovery are faster and we are able to save time now in our company.

Fortunately, the tool's pricing and licensing are not a concern for me at the moment. Other teams handle it.

The evaluation of other solutions against Zerto was pretty quick. In our company, after we saw a Zerto in use, we couldn't find anything else like it in the market.

I have used Zerto to protect VMs in our company's environment.

Considering that there is always someplace to go from where our company is currently, I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

I am a part of the disaster recovery team. We manage Zerto for our customers. We perform business-as-usual tasks such as installing Zerto or implementing Zerto for VMware infrastructure and if needed, for cloud infrastructure. We manage Zerto on a daily basis. We create the VPG, add virtual machines to the replication, operate Zerto to perform maintenance, and so on.

We use Zerto for live replication. It is real-time replication that takes around a couple of seconds. We don't use long-term retention or backup. We perform failover tests and live failovers as well.

Our customers are mostly satisfied with RPO, which only takes a couple of seconds. It does not cause big problems. It usually takes a couple of seconds. You do not have to perform any specific actions to keep it running because it mostly runs by itself and even resolves some of the issues itself. Zerto is very much related to VMware infrastructure. If VMware infrastructure is running fine, then Zerto runs fine as well. Zerto itself does not cause any problems.

I cannot compare it with others because we are mostly using Zerto, but we are very satisfied with it because within a couple of minutes, or even seconds, we are able to recover a VM or multiple VMs. Other recovery systems might work similarly.

Its ease of use is valuable. You do not have to do much to install Zerto or implement Zerto on the infrastructure. It is not very complicated. It does not have large requirements. There are mostly network requirements. It is required to be connected to two sites or more, and then you just install Zerto Virtual Manager. You also install virtual replicators on the ESXi host and perform replication of VMs.

I do not have any specific ideas right now. I know they moved to the appliance version with Zerto 10, but I do not have much experience with that because we are still using Zerto 9.5 and 9.7. The appliance will be faster and more secure. It will be good.

I do not need any additional features. The replication is real-time. We are very satisfied that this is happening all the time. We do not have to touch anything. When we implement it in a proper way, everything works fine. We just let it be.

I have been using Zerto for around two years as an engineer.

If the VMware infrastructure works fine, then Zerto works fine. I have only observed a couple of issues, but usually, Zerto Virtual Manager and VRAs work fine. They are not very problematic.

I do not have much experience with scalability. One of the customers has eight vCenter servers, and each one of them has Zerto implemented. They are all connected with each other, so sometimes replication goes to a couple of vCenters. Another customer has only two vCenters but with a large number of ESXi hosts in VMs. There are around 500 VMs that we have in production for one customer. 

I have contacted their support multiple times. They are quick to respond. They are happy to help. They are happy to connect by Zoom to have a session to share the screen. I am satisfied with them so far. I would rate them an eight out of ten because not every response is as we expect. They do resolve the issue, but sometimes customers have unusual questions, and they are not able to say how exactly to fix that or how to do something, but overall, it has been very good.

Positive

I have implemented Zerto from scratch on the infrastructure. In most cases, I am not configuring the network. There are other engineers to do that, but if the network is working and I have all the information I need, then installing Zerto Virtual Manager and Virtual Replication Appliances (VRAs) is very smooth and simple.

If everything is configured as it is supposed to be, it does not take long. It also depends on whether you need to deploy a Windows VM or appliance. If you need to deploy an appliance, it will take a little more time. Deploying a VM and installing Zerto Virtual Manager and VRAs takes a couple of hours.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room to improve, but I do not have anything specific that can be improved.

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.