Zerto Reviews

My use cases with Zerto are primarily focused on backup and ransomware protection.

There has never been a situation where we've had to use Zerto for DR.

We have improved RPOs and RTOs. Immutability is a huge factor.

The near-synchronous replication is a great feature. It does work, and it's nice to have that. We're backing up all the time. 

We couldn’t see its benefits immediately. A lot of time had to pass, and honestly, we're still working on it.

There is one one-click remediation for ransomware.

We have had some technical difficulties getting a full restore at a file level. One of the problems we were having was to do a full VM recovery to get one file, because we were encountering errors within Zerto. I don't think we have that one fixed yet. However, we do see a huge improvement in our RTO with a full VM recovery.

Zerto is pretty robust. My input would be to have their sales engineers not overpromise and then have the product underdeliver because we were scoped not-appropriately sized target hardware. That hit us hard. We went with Exagrid as our target. Because of incorrect sizing, we didn't get the expected compression, and we ran out of space. We didn't have enough capacity for all of our backups the way we wanted them tiered. It crippled Zerto as well.

I still don't know how I feel about the purchase by HPE. Their support has been top-notch. They've been trying to work with us to get this fixed. However, I didn't like some of the proposals that they made. At one point, they proposed that we pull out Zerto and put in the HPE backup solution.

I have been using Zerto in my career for several years now, and it has played a crucial role in my work.

It's stable.

They're pretty responsive. The quality is there. It looks like we need to go back to the drawing board, which is very unfortunate. I would rate them a nine out of ten. Their support is very good.

Positive

We've used Veeam in conjunction with Dell's Data Domain. We also used the other VDI solution. They're a direct competitor of Veeam. 

I prefer Rubrik over Zerto because of scalability, but the drawback is the cost. Rubrik costs considerably more.

Initial deployment seemed easy. It was a little time-consuming and took a little bit of my sysadmin's time to create all the tiers and do all the configuration, but it was pretty easy. It was smooth.

After the deployment, it does require some maintenance. Because of all the problems that we've had, the maintenance has been fixing or trying to fix what wasn't correct with scoping. We keep running out of space, so our maintenance is that we go in and reconfigure our tiers, and we don't get a 100% backup.

It's fair. My biggest gripe with Zerto is the initial scoping. What we were promised didn't work with what we ended up with. At one point, our Exagrid representative told us that he doesn't know why they scoped it this way, but that's impossible. We can't do what we're expecting to do with just these two Exagrids.

I would rate Zerto a seven out of ten. Their product is solid, but the implementation left a sour taste in my mouth.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery automation for our most critical, highest priority, and time-sensitive failovers.

I understand that Zerto can enable disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center, but that's not the use case that we have here.

We primarily use Zerto as a disaster recovery product, but we haven't had a disaster. It hasn't allowed us to minimize downtime. However, it helped us avoid the need for downtime during testing scenarios. 

Zerto helps to protect virtual machines in our environment, and that is our primary use case. Zerto provides the most aggressive RPO in the industry, and it really is one of the only products that can give you near real-time recovery.

We use VMware as a hypervisor platform to run all of our virtual workloads. Zerto is the replication service that I use to automate the failovers between my environments without having to have expertise in bringing application replication up, like a SQL cluster would require or an Exchange cluster would require, because the entire VM comes over. It helps us to reduce our overall VM footprint because we don't have to run resources in two different data centers. We can just shift them between the two using Zerto.

The ability to test a failover non-disruptively with Zerto is valuable, as it doesn't create any downtime for the business.

Near-synchronous replication works effectively, and it's important for our databases because that's going to give us the least amount of data loss on the failover.

I run a very dense VM-to-host ratio in my environment. Whenever maintenance is being performed on a host, all the VMs on that host have to be powered down and/or moved off to complete that maintenance cycle. It is frustrating when the protection of VMs doesn't get relocated to another host before the replication appliance powers down. It sometimes works great, but if the host has a lot of VMs on it, there may not always be enough time to relocate all of the VMs from a protection group standpoint to other hosts before the replication appliance that Zerto uses to manage that powers itself down. In such a case, you are breaking replication for the duration of that maintenance, and that can cause some support issues when you bring it back online, where you have to go in and manually recover it. I know they added improvements over the years. It's not as bad as it used to be, but at times, I still end up breaking replication when I do maintenance on my hosts.

I've been using Zerto in my career for about six years.

I've never had any stability issues with Zerto, as the management console has always been reliable, though there are occasional web timeouts. You just have to refresh your browser session to log back in if there's a stale browser window open or something like that, but it has always been easy to log in. I never had to open a support case to use the product. It has been more along the lines of a configuration change or replication. It is very reliable.

Zerto is quite scalable, as they added functionality where if you need to attach more disks and storage, it spins up additional replication appliances automatically. It doesn't require anything from the user to manage those. It happens automatically. I've been able to scale up as needed, with hundreds of VMs without any issues.

I've contacted Zerto's technical support. I've always had a good support experience with Zerto. The engineers are knowledgeable and respond quickly. When I open a ticket, I usually get a call within an hour or two. It's definitely good and better than other vendors that I've worked with.

Positive

I was previously using the VMware Site Recovery Manager, but it was very difficult to keep it functioning. We could not rely on that kind of uncertainty for a disaster recovery product. We needed something that's just going to work and not require a lot of assistance to keep it running, whether it's compatibility or upgrades. We needed something that was going to run when needed. Zerto is very reliable. It has definitely been a very stable product for me.

Zerto is the fastest among the solutions I have used. It usually takes less than five minutes to have a full recovery of the VM.

The initial setup with Zerto was easy. I did a proof of concept and got it running within the same day. Deploying it into production was again a very quick experience. The time required depends on how much of the initial configuration you want to do for the VMs you want to protect.

It was just me handling the setup and implementation of Zerto.

I ballpark Zerto's pricing at about $1,000 per VM, which I find fair for what it does, but the cost of entry was tough initially due to the minimum number needed to start. I really needed to prove to the business that it was worth the investment. We started with 15 VMs so that I could show the product does what it needs to do, but ultimately, we needed to protect all of our SQL workloads, so we quickly scaled up from there. 

It's cost-prohibitive for non-critical workloads, so we wouldn't put development servers or any non-business-critical systems in there because we wouldn't need the aggressive RPO and RTO that Zerto gives us for those types of workloads. I accomplished those failovers through other replication technologies.

Overall, I would give Zerto a ten out of ten.