Zerto Reviews

We primarily use Zerto for our critical applications and infrastructure to allow immediate failover at our DR site. We licensed our critical applications and database servers and standard backup the rest. In order to increase uptime, we replicate our entire Active Directory infrastructure as well.

We are able to pass many financial and IT audits because we have a solid system in place with zero RPO/RTO. Furthermore, we can train almost any tech or engineer on the process of flipping to the offsite primary. The button and some minor DNS changes and we are up and running.

The ease of failover and test environments has proven invaluable. It is literally as easy as pushing a button to flip to a contained test environment for staging roll-outs or verifying backup integrity. The upgrade process initially was tedious, making sure every VM host got updated separately, but now it is streamlined and a breeze.

I would like to see better notifications when the sync is off for an extended length of time.  There is nothing worst then going to do an upgrade or test a restore and realizing some of the VPGs need to be fixed because their journal is too small causing bitmap syncing to be off.

Stability is tied to the latency of your offsite DR.

The scalability is directly correlated to your storage and compute. More licensing as you grow is all you need.

The technical support for this solution is great. Every time I have had an issue, I get a real person, quickly, who remotely takes over and repairs the issue.

We were using RecoverPoint by Dell EMC prior to this solution. We switched because it was extremely cumbersome and far from streamlined during failover.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. It's literally an install button and then next, next, next... 

Zerto assisted us with the deployment.

Have not had to failover often but the ability to test product upgrades has been invaluable.

The cost is not dirt cheap but also is not terrible.

We thought about VMware Orchestration.

If you are looking for an extremely easy solution to implement and is highly effective then this is your baby.

The two key features for AssureStor are hypervisor based replication and the automation for failover, testing and failback.

As a cloud service provider we are always looking at how we can reduce risk for our customers, the ability to provide a DR service that delivers RPO’s typically as low as 15 seconds, over relatively slow connections is fantastic. And as the replication is performed at the hypervisor level we can protect any virtual (VMware or Hyper-V) environment without worry about the storage layer. The automation element is also a crucial element as it ensures we do not have to spend lots of man hours in the event of a DR failover request, as well as streamlining the ability to test the DR environment without needing any down-time of the production environment. And finally add in the ability to automatically reverse replication once you have failed over allowing you to re-seed the production site and failback with minimal downtime and you have a great all-round DR solution.

Before we took on Zerto our DRaaS offering was based on snapshot based backup’s with an automated restore process to our cloud hypervisors. This was a good service but we could only offer RPO’s as low as 1 hour and even then this was subject to caveats specifically around the size of the VM and how quickly we could ship the new data to our cloud platform. In addition, testing was much more cumbersome and meant a much higher number of hours had to be invested in every DR test, ultimately raising our costs. With Zerto in place we are now offering commercially sound services to small and large businesses without the worry of needing to invest in large numbers of staff to manage and perform testing, etc.

Backup capability as it is limited and not as streamlined as it could be. At present Zerto delivers backup protection by making duplicate copies of VM disks to a defined storage location (but this is limited on the schedule and retention). In the latest version 4.5 this has now been extended with the capability to do object level recovery from the replicated VMs, the caveat here is that the retention period is limited to the journal retention (which is a maximum of 14 days). I would like to see a more integrated backup/retention capability in the solution allowing more flexible scheduling and unlimited retention with the capability to easily restore objects using the one Zerto web interface. The backup images should be able to be stored off-site, away from the main replication site, and easily be reintegrated in the main DR platform if needed for VM recovery of an old image.

I've been using it for 18 months. v4.5 for the last four weeks, and prior to that we ran v4.0 since our initial deployment.

When we first deployed Zerto we didn’t understand some of the limitations around the built-in database (it uses SQLite). Whilst this would normally be fine for most small to medium deployments (the database is supported for up to 100 protected VMs and 4 sites), as a cloud provider we needed to have greater scalability. This is provided by using a full deployment of Microsoft SQL, thankfully Zerto have a tool that will migrate the SQLite DB into your Microsoft SQL server so the transfer is pain free, but I would make sure that anyone who is deploying in an environment that may have more than 100 VMs to deploy initially on Microsoft SQL. Another area to be aware of in scalability is not with Zerto itself but the demands it can put on the DR storage environment, you will be replicating all your VM disk writes as well as journaling and potentially adding more demand when testing (as the Zerto continues to replicate even when testing, which is great, but does hammer the storage).

We've had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

In one word, fantastic. When we evaluate a product one of the key areas we look at is the level of technical support we will get from the vendor. Bottom line IT systems have a habit of going wrong (one of the reasons I have had a job for the past 20 years), so once you accept that no system will be error-free, you need to know that if you do need help its available. We have had issues, bugs and questions and in every case we have been supported by the Zerto tech support team.

Our DRaaS platform, prior to Zerto, was an extension of our Asigra Cloud Backup platform. Whilst this worked it could not deliver the low RPOs we now see with Zerto nor the efficiencies we see from Zerto in managing day-to-day tasks on the platform such as validation, failover tests (and on the odd occasions actual live failovers). Our choice with Zerto was based on our own piece of mind, we protect a variety of end-users so never failing them (i.e. never failing to replicate their VMs and know we can spin them up when needed) was crucial, Zerto has delivered this for us.

Our deployment was fairly complex, but then we had to deploy a platform capable of multi-tenant support with complex networking and integration with vCloud Director so that customers could access their DR systems via a secure web interface. If you are deploying a site-to-site solution then deployment is very straightforward. Each site requires a Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) which is deployed upon Windows, this will then integrate with your vCenter servers at each site. From here it’s a few button clicks to deploy the Virtual Replication Appliance/s (VRAs) which are small Linux systems bound to each host that handle the ‘smart’ features of Zerto Replication, linking the site and your off.

Deployment was performed using in-house resources. The most important bit of advice I can offer to anyone considering implementing Zerto is understand your storage requirements at the production site and then decide on what levels of performance are acceptable. If you want to have low RPOs (seconds) then remember that you will be replicating all of your production writes into the DR storage device. And as initially these writes are put into the journal datastore and then read out after the defined retention period and written to the actual storage datastore be careful not to overload your DR SAN. As an example we deploy using separate SANs for journals and customer storage, with larger customers getting dedicated storage designed to accommodate their traffic patterns.

As a Zerto Cloud Service Provider (CSP) our licence model is different to end-users who can purchase the licence on a perpetual basis. For us the ROI was under 6 months, but we already had a large portion of the hypervisor and storage environment needed so were able to keep our costs to a minimum.

Zerto, in my opinion, is one of the best DR products on the market currently, its only flaw (if it can be called that) is that it is limited to virtual environments, specifically VMware & Hyper-V (it does also support replication to AWS if needed). If you are looking to streamline your DR capability and remove risk then speak to Zerto and get them to run you through a demo, what they say the product can do is not sales talk, it really can do it.

Zerto Dashboard

Failover Wizard

Recovery Checkpoints (Journal)

We use it for backup and replication.

The total time for replication has been reduced drastically for us and that really adds value in the long run because time equals money and resources.

It has also helped to reduce our DR testing. Previously, when we were doing it across our own locations, we had to make sure it was working by doing a lot of testing back and forth.

Also, the solution is already up to the mark on audits and certification.

For us, the most valuable features are the quick upload time and how the sync works. The sync is pretty good and that's really helpful. The quick upload is important to us because other solutions were lagging behind. We have VMware SRM and Veeam, and they have been pretty slow and sluggish. We have had some challenges with them.

We have been using Zerto for seven years.

We're just replicating and I assume it runs on some kind of cloud as an overlay, so the stability is pretty good.

The scalability is insane. Really good.

An area for improvement is the support because it gets really expensive. They need to make it a little cheaper. Support also takes time.

Neutral

We still have some other solutions in-house. We are not fully dependent on Zerto. We are still trying to get rid of the others, but we have not entirely moved on.

In 2014, when Zerto was launched, the initial setup was pretty simple.

We used an integrator. Our experience with them, at our engineering level, was that it was pretty smooth and streamlined, the first time we used Zerto. We had a few issues in the initial deployment, but later on, when we moved to scripting, the process became streamlined.

I would like to see different service levels. They're good, but it still takes a lot of our budget in ops.

We evaluated Veeam and SRM. Zerto is an HPE product, and we have been using a lot of HPE servers. That trust in HPE won our business.

When comparing Zerto with Veeam and SRM, the latter are newer in the market. They try to provide a multi-cloud strategy with tie-ups across six different clouds, which is different from Zerto. That's where I would use them if I had to.

All the solutions were almost equal but Zerto is still better because they have a lot of releases and new versions.

We are just using it for backup and replication. We have not yet had an event where we have had to restore.

We use Zerto as a migration platform from a customer's data center or from their on-premises environment to our data centers. We also use it for disaster recovery.

Zerto has helped to reduce the number of people involved during a data recovery situation in our company. All we have to do is click a few times. We have even configured a DR solution for our customers so that they can do it themselves. We give them access to the Zerto platform, as well as have a small manual of instructions, and they can go do it. It's very simple to use and to deploy and to support. It does not have a very large learning curve.

For our clients who do DR in the cloud, Zerto has definitely saved them money. We only have a few DR client accounts, but for the ones we do have, there haven't been any failures of Zerto, whenever we do failover tests. It performs well.

It's a great platform because it's very well built, technically. 

It's also very much faster than any other migration or disaster recovery platform we have. I work with virtualization, mostly on VMware, and I must admit that Zerto is even better than VMware Site Recovery Manager. Zerto compresses the data and it works much faster. We use it whenever we can, and especially whenever we are on a tight time schedule for closing a project, or we need to bring information or VMs from a client or from another data center. Zerto is very valuable because of its speed.

And in terms of ease of use, when I started with my current company I didn't even know about Zerto. My first project was a migration from a big customer and I thought, "Wow, this will be a lot of work." It was a little scary because of the pressure to get it done. But Zerto was so easy to use. I like it a lot.

I've been using Zerto for about 12 months, but the company I work for has been using it for four or five years.

It's very solid, like a rock. It's very stable.

Even with the most recent customer that we migrated to our data center, it was really impressive that Zerto kept the levels of performance very consistent. This customer's site was at another data center provider, not one of ours. It was on a very old VMware version, and we were deploying them to the latest, vCenter Server 7. At first I thought, "We will be struggling to bring this customer over," because they were two major versions behind. I didn't think Zerto would be compatible for making this migration happen. But it worked like a charm, and we had no problems regarding Zerto itself. While we had some problems with this migration, they were not related to the technology.

It's very scalable. Most of our core usage here is for migrations from our customers' on-premises or data center instances. And about two years ago, we had a very big migration of over 3,000 virtual machines, and Zerto performed really well. That's why we have kept Zerto in our portfolio.

Their support is amazing. We have had to open some support cases and they have a very good technical team. They're always referring us to their technical teams if we need to discuss something. Or if we fail to understand some of the concepts, we can reach out to them too. It's more than a commercial relationship. They support us whenever we need help.

Positive

We do setups of Zerto every week or two weeks, because it's not a single platform. We are a multi-cloud environment and service provider. We deploy it according to project requirements. So we don't have a single Zerto platform. We are always deploying VMs and DRs.

Zerto is very easy and straightforward to set up. Whenever we want to use Zerto for a migration from an on-premises customer to our data center, we usually create a WAN to WAN link, or a LAN to LAN, or a VPN link between the customer and us. We just deploy the VPNs from our side to the customer site and request access to their environment. We check for special VM configurations. It's pretty straightforward. We don't like telling the customer to do it, even though it's very easy to deploy and configure, because it's part of our service to do this job for them. We also have our own guidelines and policies that we use to configure Zerto for the best migration setup.

The last deployment I did took me four hours, which included setting up both my side and the customer side, doing the pairing and, later, the VPG's. We migrated over 100 VMs and it took about two days to fully replicate their site to ours. The migration window to do the move was about six hours because they had to change applications. But the move itself took no more than two minutes for every Zerto machine. 

When I talk to the customers, I tell them that it will be faster than the move window we request. Most of the time set aside for the window is for taking applications offline, because they will often need to reconfigure them. When client data comes from an on-premises site to our data centers, there are usually IP address changes, or we have to update VMware tools, or do something at the Zerto machine level by changing Zerto hardware, such as a network card. The moving itself is pretty straightforward.

Because I'm a support engineer, I don't really work directly on the commercial side of things. Whenever I need to request a license for Zerto, someone on our dedicated licensing support team takes care of it. So I don't know if that process is easy or not.

Zerto works very well as a backup and recovery solution, with frequent recovery points. It's very good. But it's too pricey for us to use it as a backup solution for all of our clients. Not every customer needs recovery points every five seconds.

It's a great platform, if you use it as a recovery system and as a migration tool. It's really amazing. It's a very well-developed product and one of the best solutions. In the same way that what makes Microsoft big today is Active Directory, which is an amazing product and one that no other enterprise could do any better, Zerto is the same type of leader in its category and is at the very top, without a doubt.

We utilize Zerto to backup our on-prem environment to our cloud provider. We've also used it for migrations from on-prem to our cloud provider.

Our deployment model is a hybrid. We're using on-prem and also replicating to Azure.

It is used in our production environment and also our lower environment, on-prem. It's like a DR, as we're backing it all up to our cloud provider. There are a handful of servers involved, replicating and backing up.

It saves us about eight to 10 hours a month in staff time.

Another benefit is just the peace of mind that everything is backed up. We rely on the backups, that they're good backups. It's not like we have to second-guess them.

It has also helped us with our migration to our cloud provider. It's made it easier, sped up the process, and taken a lot of the guesswork out of it.

The solution has reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations for our backup and recovery side by at least two people.

The most valuable features are 

• the single pane of glass
• the reduction in time it takes for our systems engineering team to manage the platform.

In addition, the RPOs and RTOs are great on it. It keeps up with things. The protection has been perfect so far when we have done our tests of spinning things up every six months or so. All our backups have come up with no issues at all. They just make great replication copies.

Zerto is also easy to use. That single pane of glass makes it very easy to check on the status of replicated items, and if there are any issues, to dig into them to fix them.

So far, it's been pretty good. I haven't had any issues. If I had to pick anything, it would be the documentation for upgrades. They need to make it easier for users to do upgrades without having to contact support, by providing better documentation for that.

We have been using Zerto since 2018.

So far, it's been very stable. We don't have any issue with the services or the ZVAs. They just keep trucking. There have been no stability issues at.

It's very easy to scale with it. As our environment has grown over the years, we've been able to add ZVAs to it, configure them, and they just fall right into the mix. Scaling is very easy.

Technical support has been very helpful and quick to get back with responses. Ticket turnaround time has never taken more than an hour for me to receive a response back to a general question.

We used Avamar. The primary reason we switched to Zerto was the integration with cloud providers that it provides.

I was not involved in the implementation, but I do remember that it was a pretty short implementation time. It included setting up the ZVA agents in our on-prem environment and connecting to our provider's cloud storage. The longest part of the implementation was getting the data, the initial seed or the backups, up there. But that's nothing against Zerto. Every environment will be different on that and has to get its initial copy up there. Since then, keeping copies up to date has been good. It meets up with RPOs and RTOs.

The initial implementation and getting everything set up took us about two and a half weeks. After that, to get everything that we are protecting into the cloud took us close to a month. We had to do it in stages, due to our work environment and our connections at the time. We didn't have the biggest connections, but that's more on our side, not Zerto's.

There are three people involved in maintaining Zerto for us. They're systems engineers.

Zerto is a lot easier to use than Avamar: easier management, easier setup, and the single pane of glass to watch over everything makes it better. I wouldn't say there's really a cost savings. They're probably comparable in price, but there were a lot more features and options with Zerto than in Avamar.

If you want something that's easy to set up, with a single pane of glass, and that doesn't take a backup administrator to admin, Zerto is the way to go.

The only lesson we really learned, and this has been resolved now, is that when we initially started using Zerto there were some hiccups when it came to Linux servers, hiccups that we had to work through. Support was very helpful and resolved it for us, but it made it a little bit of a manual process. In the later releases of Zerto, they've resolved those issues. They just had to work out some kinks.

In our case, we used Zerto Replicator mainly for DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan), but also for testing.

For example, journaling capability allows you to recover from a ransomware attack. Thus, it is not only used in DRP scenarios.

In addition, there are increasingly more environments (such as IBM BlueMix) that support Zerto replication, for public cloud contention environments.

Zerto allows RPO of seconds, without need of snapshots. It is agnostic to storage and allows journaling of up to 30 days.

For me, limiting the minimum licensing package for 15 virtual machines (VMs) is a issue. Not all environments (especially in Latam) start with 15 VMs.

No, not really.

No, not really.

The support is in English only, and I estimate it 4/5.

I know Veeam B & R and VMware SRM (along with vSphere Replication) and in environments with aggressive RPO, and non-reliance on snapshots, Zerto is a superior solution.

It is not really complicated, if you do a previous good design. Installation is non-invasive, does not require agents in the virtual environment.It is not really complicated, if you do a previous good design. Installation is non-invasive, does not require agents in the virtual environment.

The licensing is by virtual machines, start in 15, and grow in packs of 10. There is an annual support that must be contracted.

Yes. Veeam B & R and VMware SRM (along with vSphere Replication and storage-level replication) were evaluated.

It is important to have clear:

1. Required links between sites.
2. Available network (ideal network L2 inter sites).
3. Capacity for journaling (+/- 7%) in contingent site.

We use the ZERTO Implementation to pretend critical VM and Groups of VM (Application Consistency) from failing. The solution with ZERTO helpy us to TEST and Failover without pane. Installaion is based on local primary site and remote desaster site with a distance of a few 100km and a bandwith up to 30Mbit.

Managing the system is easy and reliable, you can choose any VM you want to replicate to your DR Site in Combination with other VM's. Testing a DR is easy and well reported.

Any business unit can define it's needs for SLA and the IT department is able to follow these needs with less management and overhead. If a problem occurs (like ransomware or db errors) IT department is able to roll Back to the right point without loosing productivity of other not effected VM. So for both business and IT it is much easier to use Zerto and profit from best function and best performance in these area of replication tools

Migration of complex VMware and Hyper-V solution. Using Zerto to replicate to azure and S3.

DR Solutions with less management and less space. Licensing of DR Site is not necessary until activation of VM. That are very good news for Db users.

As described above, only the WAN traffic regulation should be monitored, if it runs it works fine and absolutely stable

More VM more bandwidth over WAN, but this is normal. In competition with other replication tools, Zerto works well and compression is fast and stable. If you want to scale order license for it and go on.

Customer Service:

Really fast and helpful. The documentation is a good stuff to read before calling, most of the events are well described and could be solved easily by yourself

Technical Support:

very fast and very good

We uses before VMware Site Recovery. It is to complex and expensive at all.

Parallel to the primary replication tool Zerto, we are using VEEAM Always On Replication Version 9.5. It works but we can't replicate in the same manner as Zerto, because this tool works with events and they are queued so you will not be able to replicate in the same way as Zerto. Also the amount of VM's to replicate at the same time is limited to the VEEAM Environment of proxies. More Proxies more VM, but also more overhead and bandwidth usage.

It works fine for replicate a few times a day, but not in sec.

If you follow the documentation you need about 20 Minutes to first run of replication. This is fast and you can choose it if you want with the trail license from Zerto by yourself.

No we did by documentation and without external team.

Hopefully 50% less than with teh other solutions, we will have a look to it after a year production

Licensing is VM based so you can buy packages or single VM. Price is not low but the power of application is high, so you will get your money back, in case of Disaster situation. You will be so fast back in production and this is very rent-able for the business units you safe from outtakes.

Yes, Site Recovery and VEEAM Always On Solution

With the next generation Zerto5.5 they allow replication and production in azure, so cloud based DR comes reality.

Everybody who looks for alternative solutions in physical sync mirroring of data (Metro-cluster) should think about business needs and ABC (Application Business Continuity) Zerto can do it and helps you to keep business online with less cost than other solutions.

We use Zerto to protect our staff information against ransomware and is outlined in our disaster recovery plan. We have a DR site that we failover to if anything happens at our primary data center. We have only our core services, that we could not live without, being protected.

It is very easy to use. Almost anyone in our IT team can manage it after not using it for months at a time. As the DR strategist here, I like that. I enjoy having a fast way to bring a server back up. It will take me longer to get to my desk and log into everything than it will to actually complete the failover. 

I really like how you can test the failover as often as you need.

The reports it generates are very good at showing our protection state.

It is self-healing in case I mess up on something and need to re-sync. When you are protecting Terabytes of data, this comes in handy.

I think Zerto could do better with size planning because it would be nice to analyze a server for a week and give an estimate on sizing the Journal. I find myself estimating too high.

It would be nice if I had an option to dynamically restore to any host in a cluster. Right now, if we have multiple things happen and the main host is down it will not work. 

We are only using a fraction of what it can do. If you add the backup function it scales very largely. I could see a hospital really finding this product useful.

My first experience with technical support was not good at all. In the last few years, it has improved quite a bit. 

Prior to this solution, we used storage mirroring and DFS syncing. Our old way used far too much storage. Zerto compresses the data well. 

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward. We were making initial syncs in forty-five minutes. 

We did both, with most over the phone. Their expertise was fine. I didn't in any way feel like I was not getting my questions answered. 

Our ROI happened in nine seconds.

I don't remember it being cheap. We started out slow, which was a good call. We found that in an event that was massive enough to cause an entire cluster to go offline we would be happy with our core services up and running.

At the time, Zerto was the only product doing this so easily. It might still be.

Don't underestimate how good it feels to rollback data instantly. It makes me look like a Wizzard at my desk.