HPE Zerto Software Reviews

I am a system engineer and IT architect. We use Zerto to protect our production -environment and critical applications. Everything is on-prem. We don't do any DR to the cloud. We're protecting around 300 VMs right now.

I've been fortunate enough not to need to rely on Zerto in an actual disaster, but we do testing every year. Sometimes, it's multiple times annually or at the year's end. It takes the recovery workflow, which would normally take a lot of planning, and reduces that to just a few minutes. 

The most valuable feature is the low RTO that covers our VMs and a secondary data center.

I would like Zerto to add support for VMware's lifecycle manager. 

I have used Zerto for about eight years.

I rate Zerto eight out of 10 for scalability. We have one instance per data center that supports everything that we need, and we haven't had to scale past that.

It's been several years since we've looked at other products. We used VMware SRM in the past, but Zerto is way faster. Zerto is easier to use than other solutions we've tried. 

Zerto is easy to set up. Once you've deployed the appliance and connected it to a  vCenter, your VMs are protected pretty quickly.

Zerto costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year, and we haven't needed to use it in a real DR situation, so it's hard to quantify an ROI. However, based on what we know from testing, it will be a huge benefit in the worst-case scenario. 

Zerto's pricing is pretty competitive. They recently went through a licensing change where you have to buy an enterprise license as an organization. We weren't happy with that just because it forced us to pay for extra features we don't use. We would prefer if we could still have that standard license.

I rate Zerto nine out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery. 

We set up the environment and we're testing right now. We are able to do test recoveries and restalls. Once we have everything set up, we'll try a real failover test. 

The DR - Disaster Recovery - is the main selling point. We have a policy that requires us to have, in case our primary goes down, a failover for our production environment to another site. 

The near-synchronous replication is very good. You can set it to a second. It's important to our company. All of our applications are a part of our production. We need to have uptime. We have an SLA that meets uptime requirements and needs to stay up to maintain our company reputation.

We are also protecting our VMs. 

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. It's meeting our objectives.

The journal history is only up to 30 days. If it were longer, it would be better and I would have more flexibility.

I've been using the solution for a little over a year. 

The stability is great. It is running well. 

The scalability is not too bad. We upgraded our server and we were able to scale easily. We installed Zerto on our VMware with no problem. We have about 200 VMs and Zerto is protecting about just under 100 of them. 

Technical support is an area I'm not too keen about. My experience is 50/50. Level one support doesn't seem very knowledgeable and I don't get the answers I want. That can delay us sometimes. Hopefully, they will improve. 

Neutral

I was involved in the initial deployment. 

The process is not too bad. The process was pretty straightforward. 

The vendor provided implementation support. 

We have noted an ROI. Compared to others, overall, it made sense to choose Zerto.

They are not cheap. They are more expensive than others. However, they have great features.

We did test other solutions. The speed of recovery in comparison testing was great. That was the reason why we chose Zerto over our competitors. 

We looked at Veeam Orchestrator and Veeam is not as complete in terms of DR. 

The ease of use of Zerto and the interface are easier to understand and use.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. It's around version eight. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall. 

We use it for disaster recovery. We do disaster recovery in the cloud as well. We also do routine testing of the disaster recovery functionalities.

We do disaster recovery in the cloud. Having DR in the cloud is absolutely fundamental. Backups are great, and disaster recovery is quick. If something is down, with the click of a button, we would be able to spin up multiple assets. Zerto allows us to do that.

We primarily have Azure, but we also have some integration with AWS. We found it pretty seamless. There are a couple of pain points every now and then with setting up policies and getting things to work as expected, but their support is very helpful for any of the cases that we run into. Whether it is running against RTO or having issues with certain VMs and certain workloads, we have been able to work through these issues and get it functioning as expected.

Zerto has been very helpful for RPOs. It definitely keeps us at our target recovery point. It is definitely the most important toolset for us to meet the RPOs.

Zerto definitely helps our engineers sleep better at night because we know that we can meet our RPO. We have an immediate button if we have to do a restore. Sometimes, we look in Zerto first rather than having to dig out of backup. That is probably Zerto's highest value-add.

It does near-synchronous replication. CDP has definitely come a long way. They were the first ones to do it, and they have definitely done it the best in my opinion. Other solutions that are out there are trying to emulate it, but in our stack, Zerto will always be the one on which we rely the most for continuous replication. For production workloads, this continuous replication is absolutely critical. We have a lot of SQL data and things that are constantly changing. It is sometimes a little bit of a struggle for Zerto to keep up with that much change rate, but with the tweaks that we have made, it has definitely been more possible. It is definitely something that is important to us, and for production apps, it is absolutely key. 

There are a lot of features. The UI is straightforward. It makes it very simple to group our resources and understand that our production workloads are covered because we can set them up as granular or as non-granular as we want. If we want to select an entire cluster, we can do that, or we can group it by application, which is the best practice and what we do as an organization.

The biggest pain points we have experienced are related to some of the SQL-intensive workloads just because the VPGs struggle a little bit to keep up. That might be because we are pushing too many transactions. That might be on us, but that would be my main suggestion. There might be a way to tweak the settings. There is an option to exclude scratch disks or temp disks in SQL, and that helps, but we still struggle a little bit with the databases with high transaction volume for the VPGs to keep up. We have done a little bit of work with the monitoring features that they have in the portal to identify whether ZVM or something else is overloaded and then allocate more resources to it, but there can be a little bit more transparency. If there is something they can do along those lines, that would be awesome.

Deployment is an area that can be improved a little bit. Sometimes deploying new ZVMs and things can be a little confusing. Also, with the supportability matrix, there is a little bit of a gray area sometimes as to which version is supported. There is some opportunity there to improve transparency around versioning and what to use moving forward for all workloads.

I have been using Zerto for about five years between multiple organizations.

It is very stable. We have no issues. We do not have to worry that Zerto will go down. We shifted most of our on-prem into Azure, and it works flawlessly.

It is definitely scalable. It just works. We can add more VMs. We can add more ZVMs to scale with the business needs.

We are using it mostly for the production workloads. We have a couple thousand VMs.

I would rate them a nine out of ten. It is hard to get a ten out of ten. There is always more that you can do with support, but they are always very responsive. They helped us through multiple issues with different VPG replications. We have had some issues there, and they were always very good at guidance. They always have a solution and a lot of good documentation as well to reference before opening a case. That is helpful. 

Positive

I have only used Zerto in the past. That is the one I am the most familiar with and comfortable with. I can compare it to other backup tool sets that I have used in the past, but I know Zerto is not exactly a backup solution. 

Its UI is very simple. I always find what I am looking for relatively easily. As they have evolved the web portal, it has only gotten better. The UI is definitely on point today.

I believe we have seen an ROI, but I do not know the exact number. We are definitely seeing a good return from what we have put into the Zerto product. Our business users said that it is very important to them to have disaster recovery and for us to be able to perform quarterly tests with all these different application stacks. We can show them what it is like to bring up a bubble environment and do full testing.

It was a little before I joined the company, so I cannot comment on the solutions they evaluated. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement. There could be a little bit more transparency around releases and what version to use. They have done some rebranding in the past such as ZRA and ZVM. There is some confusion there sometimes related to some of the internal terminology when you do not work on it every day, but overall, we are very happy with the product. It does what it is intended to do, and as a customer, that is all you can ask for.

Our primary use cases are for disaster recovery replication side to side. 

We were running VMware Site Recovery Manager and it ran well. It was a great solution compared to what we had before. We didn't have disaster recovery issues. We were just doing our test. It ran superbly. Zerto improved the amount of time it took to failover and address any issues. We went from failing over in about three or four hours during the test to it taking one hour. It was very fast.

It's in a single department in a single company. Luckily, we don't really have to support much of our field force. We have approximately 4,000 agents who are in eleven states, but we don't have to go out into the states. We're on in one building and it's one business unit. We manage the failovers but it's just one group management.

Approximately four users use the solution.

One of the most valuable features is the ease of management. It's very easy to manage. My team grew and a team member took over my role for Zerto support. He was able to pick the ball up and run with it. It was very easy for him to pick it up and go forward. I haven't had to do a lot of management of the product. 

Our RTO is between four to ten seconds to our site, which is about a hundred and fifty miles north of my location. We bought dedicated lines and we've been very happy with Zerto's performance. 

Zerto's two main features are ease of management and that the product just works. It does what they say it'll do.

The near-synchronous replication Zerto offers is exceptional. Our pipe is 10 GB and we haven't overloaded that connection. We are very satisfied with it.

During our test last year, we moved systems around for users to test with. We had some misconfigurations in the journal sizes, they just weren't big enough. There was logging left on some SQL servers. Our DR test lasted for three days. We had a dedicated group come in and test. We failed back to production and then put it in the test phase again. We did it all within thirty minutes, and it worked very quickly. We were very satisfied.

Zerto has had a major impact on our RTOs. We've been feeling the impact for a while. It's steady here. It's exceptional. SRM dwarfed as far as our targets for RTOs. 

Zerto has reduced our DR testing. It reduced the amount of time we have to test because it's so easy to failover. We've been very pleased with that. It's even given us the option of where we might be able to test more often anytime. We would like to get to a place where we test it once a month where we would allow some business units to test, and then do another business unit the next month.

It used to take us a week for the failover process and testing. The testing has been majorly reduced to where it now takes a day. It took a day to failover, to get everything lined up and running, and it never worked. We never were able to officially have a successful DR test. SRM fixed that and then Zerto took it to the next level. It improved drastically. This has freed up staff to work on other tasks. It used to be that we needed a room full of people for the test where we now need two. 

I don't feel like we're a big enough customer to warrant being called every week or every month but it would be good to get a little bit more contact with a salesperson or engineer group. Our account executive is very good. He's done a great job, but it was hard for him to tie down an engineer. It was a little bit of a strain to get somebody lined up to show us what version 10 was about. Once we got it, it was perfect. It would be nice if it could be easier to do that. 

They have VPGs and VRAs. The management of that when trying to do a VMware upgrade can get a little finicky. You have to bring nodes or hosts up and down where the VRAs are running on the hosts. Sometimes the VRAs won't come back up or they may not respond. So when you're done doing your work, it could be that you have fifteen servers that are not replicating. So you'll have to stop, delete, manually remove what you need to do, recreate the VRA, and that's easy enough but you have to go through and do that, and then resync. That's part of IT. They are a little finicky. 

Version 9.7 has been a little easier to work with, and it integrates with VMware a lot easier. It shuts down the VRAs. The VRAs are finicky about how they get shut down. 

I have been using Zerto for six years.

We've been very satisfied with the stability of it. 

It is scalable. 

Support has been pretty good and responsive. I would rate them a nine out of ten. They're good. 

Sometimes getting in touch with somebody is hard. We're not that big of a customer though. 

Positive

It's been easy for new users to pick up and it was pretty easy for multiple people to work within the UI.

I was indirectly involved with the setup. It didn't take very long, it was like doing an upgrade. 

You just build the servers and the proxy up, install the VRA, and then one by one had them sync.

Seven months ago we had to do a complete resync which took about four to five days. It was straightforward. There is a lot of documentation on Zerto's support site. My advice would be to get the documentation off their site. Open a ticket for support at the same time. 

We have seen ROI in terms of resources and time. For our overall management of the system, it doesn't require too many resources. The upgrades are not too bad. You may have to dedicate a staff member to do it for a couple of days. I didn't have a lot of experience with it and the two upgrades I did were simple.

In terms of time, it has saved us north of 30%. It cut down on a lot of manpower. There has been a reduction in our management pattern from other prior solutions.

You pay to play and it's not cheap but it's worth it. 

We know we have the capabilities to do disaster recovery in the Cloud rather than in a physical data center. We're replicating about 150 miles north of us. That's probably going to happen in the next five to ten years for us. We're making a pivot to where we know we're going to have to go that way with some of the cloud solutions.

We have not had to use it for data recovery due to ransomware. We have gone through the industrial hardening of our environment. We have been rated as very mature as far as our security stands. We have actually had some counterparts that experienced some issues and they didn't have anything in place, and it was very bad for them. Luckily, we have not had to use it in that capacity. We feel really good about its capability from the testing we've done. We know we can use it for malicious attack response.

We have tested it to help protect VMs in our environment and we have found that it will work for that. We got decent results with testing and I was very impressed.

In terms of it reducing our overall backup and disaster recovery management, it hasn't. We needed two staff members for the last two solutions we used. This year we will need three because I will also be involved with Zerto.

Zerto has replaced our DR and replication legacy solution. We're using Veeam for our backups but Zerto has replaced everything replication-wise. It saved costs to manage them by 20%.

My advice would be to do a POC for its concept and everything you get. Get it. Do it. It's a good product. I have friends that work with other companies that provide similar services and one of their engineers told me that you can't beat Zerto. 

I would rate them an eight out of ten. 

We utilized Zerto to facilitate the migration of servers within a data center from one location to another and employed it for disaster recovery purposes.

Zerto is user-friendly. The feedback I received from my team during the migration was that it was effortless to use. I wasn't directly involved in the implementation, but I participated in the decision-making process for purchasing and analyzing Zerto. However, the feedback I received from our team indicated that it was quite straightforward to use.

The benefit to our company was the ease of moving our servers using Zerto, which saved us a lot of time. I would like to emphasize that during the data center migration, it saved us a significant amount of time. Additionally, during the disaster recovery tests, when we actually used it, it worked exceptionally well. Zerto provides us with peace of mind. In the event of an incident, the ability to recover our data effectively also grants us peace of mind.

We utilized Zerto to transition from one cloud to another, ensuring that all of our operations and applications are now in the cloud. Having disaster recovery in the cloud is an important necessity for business continuity.

We use Zerto to help protect our virtual machines.

Zerto has helped reduce our disaster recovery testing.

With Zerto, we would not require additional staff or hire a third party to assist with disaster recovery.

Using Zerto for the migration was incredibly valuable, enabling us to save tremendous amounts of time. Thankfully, we have never had to utilize the disaster recovery feature. However, if the need arose, Zerto would be instrumental in preserving our business.

Not all of the knowledge required for implementing Zerto is available in their online documentation for non-partners.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

Scalability is really good. We deployed it fairly quickly across our environment.

The technical support is responsive and helpful.

Positive

The feedback I received from our team was that the majority of the deployment went smoothly, but there were some technical aspects that were not covered in the deployment documentation, which they had to figure out.

The deployment required two people at times, but the majority of it was completed by one person.

The implementation was completed in-house.

Zerto has saved time during our data center migration, and we are utilizing it for our disaster recovery. However, we have not yet calculated the return on investment for it.

Zerto previously had a perplexing licensing structure, but they have since resolved it by implementing a unified license.

We evaluated Veeam Backup and Replication before choosing Zerto. Zerto offers live recording, allowing us to rewind to the exact moment when the incident occurred. At the time of our selection, Zerto was the only company with this capability.

I rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

For organizations planning to implement Zerto in-house, I recommend reviewing all the setup documentation beforehand.

We use it for disaster recovery. We were looking for faster recovery time objectives. Our primary use case is protecting virtual machines in our environment.

It's improved our testing frequency, and that has definitely helped.

And the effect on our RPOs has been very good because of the continuous replication; you get more checkpoints. Compared to other disaster recovery solutions that we've used, it's much more efficient when it comes to recovery. It's much more resilient and provides a better experience. It's a better product than the traditional backup and recovery methods we were using.

Zerto has also helped reduce downtime in some situations. We can recover systems in minutes, versus hours. There has been a significant improvement in our RTOs.

It has also definitely helped us to reduce our DR testing on the order of hours and days.

The ease of use is one of the most valuable features when it comes to making changes and configuring. It's very easy to set up and configure. It's a great product.

Another very important feature, because I work in a very high-transaction environment, is the near-synchronous replication, and it works well.

They just came out with improvements for ransomware protection last week. I haven't used them yet but, overall, security and preventing ransomware is really a hot topic these days. I would like to see it detect when the ransomware occurs and provide more information on it.

I have been using Zerto for approximately five years.

It's very stable.

It's scalable. I plan to increase our usage of the solution.

I have not contacted their tech support.

We were using typical backup recovery from tape or disk. Zerto is far easier to use, simpler, more efficient and reliable, and more effective than traditional disaster recovery tools.

It has not replaced all of our backup solutions. It's another tool to prevent a disaster.

Our deployment is on a private cloud. We have compute, storage, and network that we replicate to. The initial deployment of Zerto was straightforward. It took less than 30 days to get it fully operational.

We used it in our test environment first and, once we validated that everything was functional, we included our production environment.

The maintenance involves keeping the versions up to date and there are agents that have to be updated as well.

We had a managed service provider set it up and deploy it. On our side there were one or two people involved.

I can't quantify the ROI because we haven't used it in a disaster. It's more of a cost-avoidance solution, protecting the organization.

The pricing is very reasonable. There are no costs in addition to the standard fees.

We looked at Symantec, Veritas, CommVault, and Rubrik.

Have clear requirements on what your RTO/RPO requirements are, and which applications will be involved. You need to have clear business requirements and align Zerto with your business continuity plan.

Zerto is very innovative and they're constantly making improvements. It took some time to realize some of the benefits but it's been a great journey.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery purposes. We do not use Zerto for backups, only for the redundancy of the data center.

Zerto uses a rapid user interface that is user-friendly. Zerto's Near Synchronous Replication is helpful for our 12,000 servers.

Zerto runs behind the firewall to help block unknown threats and attacks. 

The solution has improved our RTO and we rarely experience any issues during failovers. We use Zerto on-premises and Azure for the cloud. We have a very good RTO whenever we have a failover from Zerto to the cloud.

Zerto reduced our downtime by approximately 15 percent by increasing our recovery speed. Zerto also helped our organization's disaster recovery testing by reducing the time it takes to bring up virtual machines on the DR side to 15 minutes.

Because Zerto's GUI is user-friendly, it is easy to execute a failover, so we require 1/3 of the employees to perform the task during recovery situations.

Our RTO is quick, and we can recover five to ten terabytes of data within minutes of a failover.

Zerto's effect on our RPO can be improved. When we have a VPG, we typically have multiple VMs and more than ten terabytes of data. This can cause long failover times due to data limitations, and sometimes the VPG can become full.

The technical support response time could also be improved. We often have to follow up multiple times to get a response, and when we do get a response, it is not always from the correct person who can handle our case.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is stable.

Zerto is scalable. We have around 3,000 people that use Zerto in our organization. Zerto is deployed in multiple environments and multiple databases in two countries.

The technical support's response time is slow.

Neutral

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto.

Zerto is more cost-effective than Azure.

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

We wanted a solution that would help us reduce our recovery time objective, and Zerto does just that.

We use VPGs to maintain data consistency in our environment. We do this by placing multiple servers in a single VPG, which belongs to the same application or database.

Zerto can recover data quickly when the data size is under ten terabytes. However, recovery can be slow for data sizes that exceed ten terabytes.

The distance of our data transfers will affect the RTO. Data transfers within one region will be quicker than those across multiple regions.

We also use Azure Cloud and are currently migrating Zerto to the cloud. Both use a GUI interface and both have good failover tests.

I recommend Zerto but it does have data limitations when using a single VPG.

Currently, we use Zerto to replicate our production visual systems at our disaster recovery site in Germany. This allows us to easily meet our RTO and RPO.

Zerto is easy to use. Zerto is the leading disaster recovery solution.

Zerto's synchronous replication is important for our organization.

Zerto has helped our organization by merging many different technologies into one, including desktop virtualization and replication. Previously, we used to hire other providers for these services, but now we have everything in one system, saving us around 30 percent. For example, we used to have to keep a copy of our data on Veeam Backup, but now we can store it all in Zerto. This saved us time and money, and it has also made our IT infrastructure more reliable.

With Zerto, we are meeting our RPO better. Previously, it took us 20 minutes and now it is five seconds. 

With Zerto, we have the best RTO.

In our simulations, we observed a reduction in downtime when using Zerto.

Our recovery time with Zerto is excellent in data recovery situations, such as those caused by ransomware. We can save around five hours compared to other solutions.

Zerto reduced the number of people involved in our data recovery by 30 percent.

The most valuable tool is the dashboard, which allows us to immediately check the DLP status, replication data, and all other data needed to have cleaner and immediate control of the situation.

File management can be improved. Zimbra is the only platform that allows for file replication.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is a stable solution.

Zerto is scalable. We have around 200 users.

The technical support is average. We have had some cases where we were not as comfortable with the outcomes as we were with other solutions.

Neutral

We previously used a custom solution, but we switched to Zerto to unify our systems and improve visibility.

The initial setup was simple. We were able to deploy one FPE every two weeks. One person was involved in the deployment.

The implementation was completed in-house.

We have seen a return on investment with Zerto, which saved us 30 percent of our costs and improved our disaster recovery time.

The price is reasonable.

We did not evaluate other solutions because we were confident that Zerto was the best, as indicated by the Gartner chart.

I give Zerto an eight out of ten.

Zerto is deployed to replicate our on-premises and virtual infrastructure data between our two offices in Germany and Italy.

Zerto requires around two hours per month of maintenance.

I recommend that new users take advantage of Zerto's flexible license program to buy one or two licenses and try them out before fully committing.

We use it for migrations and VM protection.

The near-synchronous replication is very good. It's very critical for us. For example, with SQL, we used to use Always On to protect databases at the database level, to give us high availability and DR. But now, in Azure, we don't do that. If we wanted to do that, we would have to have a SQL Server on the protected site and another up and running on the DR site and those machines would always have to be up and running. To save on costs, instead of using Always On, we're now protecting the VM as a whole, thanks to Zerto.

It's also the main tool that we use for our annual DR tests for all of our production applications. Once a year, for one week only, we do a failover of those critical production applications from the primary site to the DR site and we let them run there for that week. Zerto does the failover and the DR site becomes the active site while everything replicates to the former primary site. Once the week is over, we do a failback and Zerto is the main tool that we use for that, and we repeat the whole process. We're then good for the whole year. Zerto is protecting those VMs.

Another advantage is that Zerto has decreased downtime for us. It could have been a situation where we were down for weeks because of something that Azure did on their end. Even though Zerto has a partnership with Microsoft Azure, sometimes Azure makes changes that are disruptive. There was one change that affected our ability to replicate our critical workloads and it was a rough one. For that week, Zerto found a workaround because they were not getting any progress on resolving the situation from the Azure team. Zerto applied the workaround in their code and we were good, but that was a rough situation. Zerto goes out of its way to help its customers. We've had issues but Zerto has been very responsive.

The quickness and efficiency of creating snapshots, on a real-time basis, is one of the most valuable features. Whenever changes are made on a server, Zerto starts taking snapshots right away and replicating them to the DR site. It's very effective and very quick. Our SLAs are 24 hours, but Zerto could do what we needed, on-prem, in seconds, and in the cloud, in minutes. Zerto is way ahead of what our SLAs are.

Sometimes we do failover tests to make sure that we will potentially have a successful failover or migration. It's very flexible and does its job very well. And one of the things I love about the product is that whenever you do a failover, it gives you the ability to either commit or roll back. Some of Zerto's competitors don't have that ability, at least in Azure. That's critical for us because after we have DR tests on a weekend, we have users sign off on their applications that everything is fine. If something isn't right, we can always roll back to how everything was right before we started the DR test. And if everything is working great, then we commit.

Since we are primarily in the cloud now, Zerto definitely needs to update its platform. When we were decommissioning one of our on-prem data centers and going to Azure, there were issues. And with Azure, it's still limited in the way we can manage our resources there. Zerto hasn't quite kept up to date with how certain elements run within Azure.

In Azure, there is something called resource groups. You cannot create a resource without a resource group. You can apply tags to resource groups and that tagging information is very critical to our company because we now have 95 percent of our production environment workloads running in the cloud. We have to make sure that every resource group is tagged correctly, with the correct team and department because we have to bill them at the end of the month. The problem is that Zerto does not have that ability. When the product fails over or migrates a VM from on-prem, or even within Azure, to another site, it does not give you the option of selecting an existing resource group.

When it fails over, it uses the name of the group that you created within Zerto. The VM is failed over with no problem in a reasonable amount of time. But the problem then becomes that the resources are part of a resource group that has no tags. It does not follow our naming commission for resource groups and then we're stuck. It's not as easy just renaming the resource groups.

These components are very critical for us but they are missing in Zerto. They're aware of it because we've had feature-request meetings with our Zerto account team. They're working on it for the next release and have mentioned that they are going to be making improvements to the product. But for now, it's lacking.

Also, a downside with Zerto is that there is a lot of management overhead when running it in the cloud. On-prem, we used to have one Zerto management appliance, but in the cloud, we have about 20 to manage to protect our VMs. Zerto has mentioned to me that, for the next release, they're building it from the ground up and it will be much better in the cloud, with more cloud focus.

Because of the experience that I had with Zerto running on-prem, where we only had one appliance in each of our data centers, I deployed one in Azure as well. Little did I know that there were limitations and that more appliances had to be deployed because of all the replication of the traffic and the number of VMs that we were trying to replicate. But Zerto stepped in and helped when it came to that.

I have been using Zerto for four years.

The stability is an eight out of 10.

The scalability is also an eight out of 10.

They're very helpful. They always want to understand your situation and, even if they're not sure, they do their best to help and fix the problem. 

For on-prem, there were always references, but for the cloud there is a bit of a knowledge gap. I would always get workarounds, fixes, or KB articles for on-prem, but the cloud implementation is where the documentation is lacking. But the team does its best. It depends on who you get. Some know Azure, or cloud, and some still lack that knowledge. But if they don't know, they get the right person on the call.

Positive

We were a VMware shop on-prem and we were migrating to the cloud from on-prem VMware to Azure, so the tool that we were using to protect VMs through DR would no longer work. We used VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) for years when we used to be solely on-prem. 

We started looking for a product to help and, at the time, Zerto was the one that stood out among the competitors, and it was a solid product, so we started using it. Zerto is definitely a more effective product. It is a lot quicker when bringing our VMs up on the DR side, and even when we do a fallback. And Zerto is a lot easier to use than VMware.

The initial setup was not straightforward.

And maintenance is required for upgrades when there are newer releases, especially when it comes to Azure. There are newer releases that contain fixes and improvements and we do update the version of the Zerto appliance. They are running on Windows Servers, so we also have to patch the operating system. In Azure, there are a lot of SKUs with different pricing. Depending on the utilization of a VM, we sometimes make changes to the family types to save on costs at the VM level.

I did it with our Zerto account team, which included our sales engineer. Just the two of us were involved.

Zerto saves us a lot of time. One team member alone can handle the DR test using Zerto, whereas before, when we used SRM, at least two or three people were involved from the VM perspective and from storage. VMware was integrated with our NetApp environment and that meant at least two or three team members were involved. But with Zerto, just one person uses the product for a DR test.

We looked at Azure Site Recovery. We were close to going with it. It did have the ability to do resource group selection, but there were two showstoppers at the time that prevented us from going forward with it.

When we were looking at Azure Site Recovery, it seemed that it had a better cost per VM, but Zerto was not that far off. And we were more comfortable using Zerto to protect our VMs than the other products we were testing.

My advice is that if you're in the cloud, you really should test the failover of your VMs. If tagging is not a key component, you'll be fine. But if it is, that is a huge problem. And expect a lot more management overhead when it comes to managing Zerto in the cloud.

In terms of our RPOs, Zerto is consistent. From time to time, it may run past our SLAs, but that's because there are network or VM issues. And that happens very rarely. It almost always meets our RPOs.

The ease of moving data varies on the size. A good thing about Zerto is that it does give you a little chart indicating the step that it's at in the replication process.  But even if it's a small VM, it does take some time, including setting it all up and starting the synchronization. It's not instant.

We use Zerto for disaster recovery and DR testing.

Zerto has improved our restoration time and made it easier to test software upgrades. It has simplified tasks like decommissioning a site and replicating virtual machines from one location to another. 

It gives us peace of mind that we can recover our systems in minutes or hours instead of days. Zerto is also helpful for insurance purposes. Our insurer wants to know how long we'll be down in a disaster. Of course, the company owners love Zerto because we won't lose business if something happens.

When we had a firmware failure, it saved us time performing a failover to our DR site. It isn't easy to calculate, but it saved us days and possibly weeks of downtime. 

A firmware update on our SAN went wrong, crashing the entire device. We're in Rhode Island, and it failed over to our DR site in Tennessee within 18 hours. Our users didn't notice because it happened on a Sunday. They had all their data when they returned to the office, and we reverted the following weekend. Without Zerto, some applications would've been down for days, if not weeks. 

Zerto has also improved our DR testing. In the past, we had to test over the weekend, but we can now do it during the work week without any outages. Our IT staff doesn't need to come in over the weekends, so it doesn't affect their personal lives. Zerto has reduced our DR testing time by about 50 hours. 

The interface is easy to use. It's not intuitive per se, but the average IT expert will have no problems using it. A non-IT person might have a little difficulty at the beginning.

I love Zerto's near synchronous replication because I can get up-to-the-minute data back in a disaster. This capability is essential because a disaster could cost the company money and even cause it to go out of business. We can sleep better at night knowing we can restore our systems in minutes.

Surgical blocking of unknown threats is a feature that's available on the cloud, but we're on-premises. However, it's certainly a feature I'd like to have, especially with all the malware and vulnerabilities. It's great to know that Zerto offers this capability, but we don't take advantage of it because we're an on-prem customer.

Zerto is too reliant on VMware's vCenter. It's tough to upgrade, move, or do anything related to virtual servers with vCenter.

Zerto is highly stable. We haven't experienced any noticeable bugs. We're sometimes too stable. Sometimes I want to upgrade my VMware ESX host, and I can't because they have not approved it on their matrix. They usually take about a month or two to accept it as a supported system, which is probably the industry norm or better, but I want it faster. 

I rate Zerto support 10 out of 10. Zerto's support team is knowledgeable and goes out of its way to help. Instead of just throwing KB articles at you, Zerto support walks you through the solution.

Positive

We previously restored everything from scratch using tape backups, but we had no software disaster recovery solution. It hasn't replaced our legacy backup solutions because we do not use Zerto as a backup. Our hardware backups are still online and working. 

We do not use Zerto as a backup solution. It is mainly for recovery. However, we use Zerto/Keepit for Office 365 backups. We still back up to tape and restore using Zerto. It has made the recovery around 20 times faster. 

Deploying Zerto was straightforward, and I did the job by myself.

We've seen a solid return with Zerto

Zerto costs more than most, but we negotiated a fair price. 

We have Veeam Backup and Replication, but we don't use it for disaster recovery. We also tried another solution for Office 365 backup. We prefer Zerto replication for the speed and support. 

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10. When implementing Zerto, you should consider your internet speed and the difference between the WAN connections at the sites you want to replicate. You need enough bandwidth to handle the volume.