Zerto Reviews

We use this solution for replication from our primary data center to the secondary data center.

The replication feature and DR functionality are most valuable. Zerto has many options when a new server is provisioned. If the application team would like to use a replication process, DR process, or RPO, Zerto can facilitate this within 15 to 20 minutes.

This solution could be improved by including some sort of compression or de-duplication for the same type of files.

We have been using this solution for three years.

It can be scalable depending on the licenses which can be quite expensive. 

We previously used SRM. SRM is as not as good at Zerto. That's the reason we bought the licensed product as opposed to the free product. I'm hoping that Zerto will be used in the future in our company for data replication purposes like SQL data.

The initial setup was very easy. I followed the documentation to set it up myself. The person completing the setup needs to understand the storage layer and the network layer for the backup. Without this understanding, It may be extremely confusing.

When you apply Zerto to your environment, you need to understand your networking settings, storage settings, and your capacity planning. Setting up Zerto took us 15 minutes. 

We recently bought more licenses and are exploiting the benefits of Zerto so I would say we are seeing a return on investment. 

Zerto helped to reduce downtime drastically by 80%. I would advise others to complete a full evaluation process to ensure they get the most out of it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We started off using this solution for disaster recovery and DR testing but then it morphed into more of a file recovery tool. We can usually get closer to a point in time recovery using Zerto versus the nightly backups that we do.

Zerto gives us peace of mind knowing that if we were attacked by ransomware, we would be able to recover data from the time before the ransomware to get us back to being fully functional. Zerto helped to reduce our company's disaster recovery testing model to where we can do it all within a day. We normally pick a time around lunchtime on a set day for the different groups to test with and it is completed by the time lunch is over. 

It definitely does make life easier when you're in a situation where you have to have all hands on deck as it doesn't require you to have as many people to bring everything back up.

The file recovery functionality is definitely the most valuable as well as the amount of time it takes to recover a VM. The different snapshots it makes are great, especially when we try to schedule DR testing with our business unit. The less time that we have to spin up the environment, the better the whole testing process will go.

One common use case I'll get is when someone says, "I deleted," or, "I've changed a file." I can ask them, "What time did you do it?" If they tell me a specific time, for example, 1:15 PM, I can pull that file at 1:14 PM and recover the data.

The backup end of this solution could be improved. We tried using it as a full backup solution and it took way too long to complete at least one backup. We tried it once and didn't try again. I'm not sure if they've improved that since then but we actually went in a different direction for backups.

I have been using this solution for six years.

This is a stable solution. 

We haven't had to scale much as we're a small business. If we were to grow, it would be a couple of servers at a time so I can't really speak to the scalability of it. We have 400 servers total and only use Zerto with what we consider mission critical.

The customer support is excellent. When you call with an issue, they answer almost immediately. The guys are really knowledgeable.

I would rate their support a ten out of ten. 

Positive

We started off with Site Recovery Manager. We did not like the process and once we tried Zerto, we saw how easy it was. That's been the solution until recently as we've added a second data center in which we use now Pure Storage with VMware. They do active clustering and we can use a simple vMotion to move from one site to another versus the way we used to do it before completing a migration with Zerto. 

We still keep using Zerto because we know Zerto works. Zerto is a lot faster especially compared to what we used to do with Site Recovery Manager.

The initial setup is straightforward. I just followed the documentation online and it was set up in a day.

I completed the setup myself. There may have been a help check afterwards once we got the first test recovery group setup. 

Based on the fact that we can rely on Zerto for recovery if anything were to happen and the confidence that our management has in this product, it's definitely worth the money. 

We paid a big investment upfront with renewal fees each year. This is another reason why it's easier for us to keep this product as well as have another solution, because we've already paid the money upfront.

When evaluating Zerto, I would advise others to try to think of any potential scenario to test with and use it to prove whether it does or doesn't work.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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.

It is controlling our mission-critical production system as a backup and a failover.

Zerto has taken us from being able to do a failover in four to six hours down to one to two hours.

The most valuable features are

• the continuous streaming
• that it takes very little CPU usage — it doesn't affect production 
• the recovery time is very short.

With the VPG (virtual protected group) it would be nice if you could pick individuals in the grouping instead of having to failover the whole group. 

Other than that, it's a pretty good product.

I have been using Zerto for about a year.

It's very stable.

I don't see a problem with scaling it at all. They could improve setting up for SQL clustering or for SQL Always On. It really is set up for a one-to-one and not for a multiple solution. They could work on that.

We will probably increase our usage in the future. Right now we have a license for 15 VMs through Zerto and we are only using 10.

We haven't worked with Zerto's technical support other than during deployment. Everything seems to be running really well now. During deployment, their support was very responsive. It's just that they did not have a good solution that worked with VMware and Nimble.

Positive

We were using Veeam. We switched to Zerto because it has continuous streaming that would keep us up to date a lot faster. Veeam kept promising they were going to have that, but they never came through on their promise, after waiting for a year. We were able to convince management to switch to Zerto.

The initial setup of the product was very complex. We were using a SQL Server cluster with a Nimble array, so it was very complicated to get everything set up correctly so it would failover correctly.

Our deployment took about six months. We had an implementation strategy for the solution but it failed three times before they could get it to work. Our deployment plan was set up to failover for our SQL cluster and several web servers to a backup location. In setting up with the Nimble, Zerto recommended that we use an RDM. The RDM did not work. We were using VMware with Nimble and the Zerto team had not used that particular solution before. We jumped through hoops three times before we were able to get the right combination to get the cluster to failover correctly.

There are only three of us working with Zerto. I am the DBA, we have a system administrator, and we have our IT director. We learned very quickly how to use the product very thoroughly since we had to rebuild our solution three times.

We were working with Zerto directly. They didn't have a good solution and we had to test out a lot of things with the hardware and software that we were using. They could have improved that. They kept giving us solutions that would not work, so we had to keep trying different solutions.

It's hard to say if we have seen ROI since it's only been running for about four months. I think that we will see cost savings over the next year.

As far as licensing goes, start out with what you need to get started and you can always scale up. Zerto worked very well with us. They have a tool called zPlanner which was able to document how much we needed to get started. That was a very handy tool.

We looked at some other options, but nothing really compared to what Zerto offered.

The main differences were the ease of use, not having to have a dedicated person assigned to watching it, and the automation. A lot of this stuff is taken care of through Zerto without us having to script or put a lot of effort in on the back-end. Everything is automated.

Make sure that they can demo what you want done before you move forward. We had a problem with the SQL clustering. Make sure that the equipment that you're using is certified by all the vendors that are involved, like VMware.

Now that we have the solution working, we're very happy. We've had it working for the last four to five months. We were able to test it with a test platform and it worked amazingly.

Our primary use case is for disaster recovery and migrations. We have two primary sites that we replicate to. If there are on-prem clients we replicate back and forth between those two and then we replicate our off-prems to them as well. We use on and off-prem as well as Azure. 

We actually have rescued a couple of clients that have had disasters on-prem due to weather or data center outages. One of our clients had left us for a cheaper provider and before our disks and retention points expired out, the cheaper provider had a flood in their data center. We were able to restore the client using the old restore points back into our data center, which was a huge win for us because it was a fairly large client. That client has worked with us ever since then. 

Zerto saves us time in data recovery situations due to ransomware. We've had a couple of ransomware incidents with clients in the last year and a half. I've worked on ransomware issues before when Zerto wasn't involved and it was much more complicated. Now, with Zerto, it's at least 50 to 75% faster. We're able to get a client up and running in a matter of an hour, as opposed to it taking an entire day to build or locate the ransomware and rebuild from shadow copies or some other archaic method.

It decreases the time it takes when we need to failback or move workloads because we use disaster recovery runbooks that we work with our clients to maintain. Anybody at our company, at any given time, can pick up this runbook and go with it so we can assign one or two techs to the incidents. They work with the client and get them back up and running quickly. We're 50 to 75% faster. It's now a matter of hours as opposed to days. In an old disaster recovery situation, it would be all hands on deck. With Zerto, we can assign out a technician or two, so it's one or two techs as opposed to five to 10.

There has been a reduction in the number of people involved in the overall backup. We have the management fairly minimized. There are only two primary subject matter experts in the company, one handles the back-end infrastructure and one handles the front-end, that's pretty much it. We're a fairly large company, with 500+ clients, so it's been stripped down, so to speak. 

From what I've seen, we do save money with Zerto, especially for long-term retention like the Azure Blob Storage. We had a recent incident where a client had to go back to a 2017 version of a server that was around three to four years old, just to find a specific file, and it only took us an hour to locate the proper retention point and mount it for him and get him back what he needed.

The testing features are the most valuable features of this solution. We use the failover test feature not just for testing failovers and disaster recovery, we've also had clients use it for development purposes as well as patching purposes to test patches. We can failover the VM and then we can make any changes we want without affecting production. It's a nice sandbox for that usage.

We also use it for migrations into our data center. We bring in new clients all the time by setting up Zerto in their on-prem and then replicating to wherever their destination will be in our environment.

We've also used Zerto to migrate to the cloud.

Zerto provides continuous data protection. I'd give it a 10 out of 10 as far as that goes. The recovery points are very recent, generally five to 15 seconds of actual production. It's very convenient.

It's also fairly simple to use. Zerto does have some quirks but they have worked those out with recent releases. They're really good about listening to feature requests. We're actually a Zerto partner at our company, so they take our feature requests pretty seriously. Zerto is one of the easiest disaster recovery products I've used. We use Veeam as well which is much more complicated to set up in the back-end.

Zerto seems to keep up with what I think needs to be improved pretty well.

One improvement that could make it easier would be to have an easier way to track journal usage and a little bit more training around journal sizing. I've done all the training and the journal is still a gray area. There is confusion surrounding how it's billed and how we should bill clients. It would be easier if it had billing suggestions or billing best practices for our clients to make sure that we're not leaving money on the table.

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

Stability is pretty good. It's gotten better over the years. It's kind of 50/50 between features that have been added and our understanding and usage of the product over the last three years. But it's definitely gotten better.

It's highly scalable. That's one of the things we like about it. We can empower clients. I have one client that's migrating from his on-premise into one of our private clouds, and we have enabled him to do so. We set up the environment and we're enabling him to build VPGs and migrate them as needed without our interaction at all. This is bringing in tons of revenue. It's super scalable and it seems to be not just easy for us to use, but easy for us to enable a client to use it as well.

Technical support is astounding. I've said that to Zerto technicians and I've said that to clients as well. Being in my role, I work with a lot of vendors, a lot of different support, and Zerto is off the charts as far as skill and ease to work with. It's been wonderful as far as that goes. Zerto was some of the best support I've had across vendors.

Before Zerto, there really wasn't anything that was as good as Zerto, so it was a game-changer.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

For an off-prem client, I would send them a welcome letter that details what they need to do on their end with the server. I would send the download package, everything like that. If the client is immediately responsive, that could be done within an hour, but then some clients take a little longer. Once they have the infrastructure set up on their end and the VPN is set up, I can have a Zerto off-prem implementation replicating into one of our private clouds within an hour or two hours maximum, even for a large environment.

A client was migrating into one of our usage-based clouds, so it automatically bills by the resource pool. The more that they put in there, the more we gain. We've probably increased the input to that environment 10-fold. It's a 10-time multiple of what we invested into it, just particularly for that one use case because he's growing so rapidly. Every time he brings over a new client, it adds to the billing which is hands-free for us. We've enabled him to do it.

Pricing is fair. For the license that we have and the way that it's priced, it is pretty simple and it's not over-complicated like some other platforms. It would be very beneficial to have some sort of training or even just documentation around every component of Zerto and how it should be built or there should be suggestions about how it should be built. It would help newer companies that are adopting the platform to have a better opportunity to grab all the revenue upfront.

Journal history was one of the things that we didn't take into consideration when we implemented Zerto initially and we lost a lot of money there. We talked to one of the reps after that and found out that some clients do roll in the cost of this journal and some clients actually charged separately for it. Zerto has made it easier to plan for that lately with Zerto Analytics, but it's still a gray area.

There aren't any additional costs in addition to standard licensing that I'm aware of. 

We still use Veeam in the environment but the recovery points aren't as robust. They're a lot thinner. You can get maybe an hour or the same, but you can't get five-second production. We used Veeam and the old active-passive standard of building a server in each environment and replicating to it.

I've actually pushed us to use Zerto for our backups with the solutions team for quite a while, since version 6.5. I don't think they plan on doing it just because we already have two other backup offerings and they don't want to complicate our Zerto infrastructure. From my understanding, we're not planning on doing it. But with every release, it gets so much better and it's just a matter of time before we revisit it.

My advice would be to follow best practices when it comes to back-end infrastructure. We have made some changes specifically to track certain things like swap files and journal history. Previously, we had everything going to production data stores and now we have dedicated journal data and restore data stores for swap files, which helps us to thin out the noise when it comes to storage. Storage implementation is very important. 

Make sure to go through all the training. The training on MyZerto is free, very straightforward and it's very informative. That's one of the things we didn't do initially but it wasn't really as available as it is now.

I would rate Zerto ten out of ten. 

We use Zerto as a robust failover and replication solution.

Currently we replicate about 50-55 VMs to our DR site. We have run multiple test failovers, and have even done a full-scale, full company REAL failover.  Zerto worked flawlessly. 

We use Zerto to make sure that our primary Server farm is replicated and protected in case of a failover.

Zerto gives us peace of mind. It is also extremely easy to use and very intuitive. We don't have to worry about what would happen if our server room were to be damaged or our building destroyed. We always have that big red button available to failover to our DR site which Zerto does flawlessly and easily. We also have peace of mind with their Technical Support, which has always been nothing but stellar for us!

I love all the features really.

The fact that the interface is so intuitive is wonderful. The setup and customization of VPGs are great too. They allow you to customize all of the IP information and even the MAC (if you wish) for any and all VMs, allowing you to change the IP or Gateway, or whatever for any VM you might failover.

It is incredibly granular and I really appreciate that. Zerto has also caused us to organize our datastores in a better fashion that makes sense so that they are by priority and not just random.

I have brought this up to support before, but it would be really nice to have the option to "roll back" a particular VM to a previous time in the past if it were to become damaged, compromised, or infected. Zerto does not allow this. It's all or nothing, so you must roll back the entire VPG. You cannot roll back a single VM unless that VM is ALONE in a VPG all by itself.

It would also be nice if they could find a way to make it where one VM does not impact the entire journal history of the VPG. I do not understand why a single VM with mass amounts of changes should impact the journal history of the entire VPG. Although this has never caused me problems, it is an annoyance for sure.

We have been using this solution for a little over two and a half years.

Zerto is literally one of the most stable solutions we have. If we have any kind of bounce, drop, or failure on our fiber line to our DR site, Zerto quickly recovers and catches everything up as soon as the failure is remedied. 

It is incredibly scalable and easy to use. I think that's what makes it so valuable and attractive, especially to those who do not have a DR solution. 

Support is VERY important, and Zerto knocks it out of the park!

Every time I have called Zerto support, the person I have spoken with has been well informed and knew their stuff. Even if they couldn't readily solve my issue, they quickly escalated to someone that could. They are probably the best vendor we deal with in our IT Dept.

We had tried other solutions in the past including SRM and RecoverPoint for VMs. I can tell you they all pale in comparison, not only in functionality and user-friendliness but in support as well.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

They assigned us an engineer and we were set up and replicating within two hours.

We used a Zerto engineer, who was assigned by our Zerto sales rep.

The ROI with Zerto can't even be measured. The peace of mind we have gotten from knowing that all of our protected VMs are safely replicated with almost live RPOs is something that you can't even quantify.

I would suggest getting a dedicated, well-informed rep. I'm sure they all have great training but always hold your rep accountable. Ask lots of questions because there are no stupid questions. 

We have evaluated SRM, RecoverPoint for VMs, and other "built-in" Hyperconverged replication solutions.

Zerto is literally the best vendor that we deal with overall as an IT Department. They have always delivered, and have always been top-notch. I highly recommend them to ANYONE, regardless of whether or not they already have a DR solution. Zerto is better.

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.

We use it primarily for DR.

What I appreciate the most about Zerto is that it is the easiest to install, upgrade, and manage. Most things in the product are fairly intuitive and easy, including upgrades. You don't have to dig through a bunch of manuals or go through a bunch of technical data to make it work.

The low RPO times of about four to eight seconds are very nice and very valuable to us.

The alerting could be fine-tuned and improved. It does a lot of alerts, but it's a little bit cumbersome to modify them.

It could be cheaper as well.

I've been using it for six years.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any real problems or downtime. The only thing is that it runs on Windows, so that has its own problems.

Zerto's scalability is very good. We haven't had any scaling problems. We tested out DR in Azure, DR to VMware on GCP, and DR on AWS. It performed on all of those. The AWS setup was the most complicated, but AWS with Windows is a little bit messy.

We currently have 400 licenses. We have two ML350s, and we use Zerto to keep them replicated. If one fails, we just move to the other. That has been expanding, and that's where we've been adding licenses.

Zerto's technical support is very responsive. We had some posts that were not working properly and caused some issues with Zerto. The technical support staff were very helpful and worked through the night to help us resolve that. They always solved any problem I've had, so I'll give them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used SRM. It had a lot of specialized plugins and specialized machines, but was very cumbersome. We weren't guaranteed that it would work all the time. It was very complicated to set up and manage as well.

SRM was storage-vendor-dependent because you had to have plugins through the storage vendors. It wasn't IP-based at the time and relied on storage-based replication. We had disparate storage arrays and disparate systems, and the IP-based replication treasury was much more resilient on our end.

The initial setup was unbelievably easy. We had Zerto up and running in five minutes, whereas setting up the SRM replication took weeks and needed technical support staff.

We deployed it ourselves.

In terms of ROI, it was quite expensive, but I think we got a lot of value out of it, such as being able to have a reliable DR method, particularly offsite. We have very poor latency locations, and sometimes, we replicate those. Zerto makes that very easy.

From a customer perspective, the price is okay. From an investor's perspective, however, it is a little bit high.

We looked at Veeam, but Zerto was a better match for our needs.

I would advise you to give Zerto a try in your environment. Get a trial license and see how it works. I think you'll be very impressed.

Overall, I've been very happy with Zerto, and I'd give it a rating of nine on a scale from one to ten.