HPE Zerto Software Reviews

I use Zerto for disaster recovery. 

The time it takes to fail a server over to DR has been great. We've seen a reduction in time spent. We can do it in minutes. Being able to go back to certain snapshots, to failover to another location, and then go back to specific snapshots is quite useful. We can roll back easily. 

The off-site replication is excellent. We have workloads that aren't DR-aware. Being able to replicate it to other data centers is great. We don't have another way to do it, currently. 

The near-synchronous replication is good. You get five-second data points. It's not something we advertise to our customers, the developers, however, we've had instances where we needed to go back two hours, prior to a file being deleted, and it's helped. 

We're protecting our VMs with Zerto. It's positively affected our RPOs. It meets the objective. It's the only way we can have a solution for certain applications where we send an entire application to another data server. 

It's a great product. There are a lot of features that it has that we don't use since we are on prem. We strictly use it for DR between our data centers. There are a lot of cloud plugins that they have that we don't use. Our use case is limited. It does everything we need it to.

I've been using the solution for probably four or five years. 

The stability of Zerto is good. We didn't have any issues. Our biggest challenge was trying to get to the clients and I was waiting on an upgrade path - from Windows to Linux. Now there is an upgrade path. Honestly, that has been the biggest challenge we've had for five years. 

The scalability of Zerto is good. You can easily protect other clusters and VRAs. It's very flexible.

Our current environment has 45 VRAs in each cluster. We have two replica pairs, two sites that mirror each other. 

In total, we have 70 ESX hosts.

Technical support is great. They've shown us many things about the manager that we didn't know about. Every time I call, I take notes. They are very knowledgeable and the knowledge-based articles on the site are also helpful. Even if I thought something was broken, they've always managed to fix it. 

We used to use VMware's SRM. With SRM, for us, it was overly complex. We used an array-based replication with SRM. We had issues where the storage team would go to do work on the array and they would fail the machine over and it wouldn't be right. We would have outages. Every time we did a failover it was a process and we would be missing rules.

This is not array-based and we can test our failover in a sandbox without taking the system down. 

The initial deployment was easy. We deployed VRAs to the host from the manager. It works very well. The amount of VRAs you have to deploy and the amount of time it takes is minimal. It took us about an hour. 

I can't speak to if the company has witnessed any ROI. 

I don't follow the licensing. It was bought for us and we use it. 

We evaluated SRM and a few others. I can't remember which ones we tested. We've been on Zerto since version six. 

The selling point for us, coming from SRM, is that SRM was tied to vCenter. We had to pay attention to versions and there were a lot of ways you had to make sure the versions were correct and it was overly complex for what we needed. We simply needed to replicate a virtual machine and that was it. Zerto stood out as it was easy.

I'd recommend the solution to others. I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. 

We primarily use Zerto for DR as a service but also for high availability purposes. It's mostly deployed at our on-prem colocation data center. We also do a little on the cloud, as well. 

Zerto makes DR a lot easier. We don't have to spin up copies of VMs or copy applications and databases. Zurto just takes care of all that for us. We just did our annual DR test, and it worked exactly how we expected it to. We're big fans. We like the fact that when you migrate DR, it will automatically be configured for us. For example, it sets the IP addresses because they have different IP ranges and various data centers.

It saves a lot of time during disaster recovery. In our tests, we just hit a button on Zerto, it did its thing, and the solution just let us know when it's done. In the meantime, we could go do other things instead of having to, copy app configs, .ini files, etc.

The near-synchronous replication is great. That's one of the reasons that we went with Zerto. I've had a great experience with it and never had an issue. Having this functionality is critical, especially for DR. If our main data center goes down, we need to flip it and have everything almost identical to what it was when the data center went down. We use it for production high availability, so if that host goes down, Zerto will just automatically forward to the replica that it has on another data store.

The post-configuration part could be improved. For example, it would be super helpful to have the ability to modify DNS. Once the migration is done, we want to do some more modifications to the endpoint.

We have used Zerto for around 10 years.

Zerto is highly stable. We've never had any issues or lost connections between the agents on the VMware host.

Zerto is scalable. We're running it in five different data centers worldwide, and we haven't had any performance issues. It covers 70 hosts across all our data centers.

I rate Zerto support nine out of 10. We haven't had to use support much because it just works. Once we had an issue with a VM that wouldn't upgrade, and they sorted it out for us pretty quickly. I've only used it once, but it wasn't a time-critical situation. If I contacted them during an actual disaster or DR test, then I could see how quickly they can work.

Positive

I've never used anything besides Zerto, but I've done the failover process manually. Zerto just makes it much easier and faster than a manual failover process.

In our DR testing, Zerto allows us to go work on other things while it takes care of everything. That's valuable because we know that we can still hit all of our SLAs in a real disaster. 

Zerto is reasonably priced for the product that you're getting. We keep on buying more licenses, so it's a good price. 

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10.

We use the solution mostly for disaster recovery, however, we use it a lot for VM migrations and data center relocations.

The ease of setting up replication, the speed, and the ease with which I can fail over and fail back are all excellent aspects of the solution. 

We've used Zerto for failing over and moving a lot of workloads from one location to another during v-center upgrades, during data center relocations, et cetera. We even had a case where we had a need to move over to our DR data center, however, in the middle of running there, our DR data center started having thermal issues, so we had to bring everything back. Zerto made that super easy.

Previously, we were using SRM. In the case of the thermal event, SRM would probably have taken, I'm guessing, an hour or two to do the failover. With Zerto, we were able to get everything moved over in about 15 minutes, and it was roughly 150 or 200 VMs that we did in that time period. 

The near-synchronous replication works. It's very quick. I like that I can fail something over and not lose any data. That's pretty important. We want to not lose data. As a healthcare organization, losing patient records would be a very bad thing. 

It's important to have DR in the cloud right now. We're looking at leveraging AVS for our DR site for the sake of not having to run our own data center. Leveraging the cloud is super important. It will help us to get away from on-prem and not even have to deal with a co-location facility. The reliability will be important. There is also the impression that there is going to be money savings around that.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. Overall, the RPOs have gotten better. Every aspect compared to where we were with SRM or prior to that, Zerto has improved. It's a lot easier to manage Zerto as it is hardware agnostic. It helps get things failed over and protected quickly. Every aspect has improved with Zerto.  

Some of the ability to automate selections and automate VPG creations could be better. We've been building out a lot of new V-centers lately, and new data centers. Whenever we create a VPG, we generally set some very specific settings. If there was a way to set a template or a blueprint, to say that if I'm replicating to a data center from here, these are always going to be my default settings. That would be ideal, instead of having to manually set everything every time. 

There are a few issues we've had with Zerto where it doesn't behave the way we want it to. I'm being told it's by design. Therefore, it's not an issue per se, it's by design. 

I've been using Zerto for three or four years.

I've had no problems with the stability. There have been a few bugs along the way, however, Zerto has been very quick to work through them. 

We have 1500 to 1600 VMs protected with Zerto and most of our DR strategy is being built around Zerto.

I can't speak to scalability. We've been steady-state since we implemented it. It's been protected by the same workloads since then. 

Zerto support has gone downhill recently. When we first started, they were great. However, after the HP acquisition, the quality of support is not as good. The knowledge has dropped and the time to respond is slower. I seem to now get people who ask basic questions that I already answered when I opened the ticket. 

Neutral

Previously, we were using SRM. SRM was a nightmare. Zeerto has been drastically better. 

The pricing is expensive. However, I definitely see the value and my corporation sees the value. 

We did look at Veeam and were using SRM in the past and Zerto seems to be the most full-featured and the easiest to implement. It's also the most powerful overall. Veeam isn't even close to what Zerto can handle right now. 

We're mostly on-prem, however, we've started doing DR into AVS - Azure VMware Service.

I'd rate Zerto eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery.

It’s improved our organization via providing better RPOs and excellent uptime. 

The best aspects of the solution are the simplicity of use and the way that it handles the RPOs and the RTOs. I like that we’re able to dial into exactly what we want. They've been able to give us better RPOs than we ever imagined.

It has a very clean interface and is easy to understand. You don't really need a lot of technical knowledge to understand what you're doing.

I don't know if it's the compression or what, however, we get really good RPOs. The system already knows what we're trying to do. It’ll estimate and give us better RPOs than what we've actually set.

We’ve improved our RPOs 100-fold.

Uptime is excellent. The last test fail-over recovery was within almost thirty seconds to a minute. It was very, very good, and I was very impressed. This is extremely vital. We have to maintain a lot of uptime. The data that we have is constantly being written and it is very vital that we stay up for public safety reasons. To be able to have something like this solution, that can fail over and fail back easily, makes us much more agile in the data center.

There are a few technical aspects that I didn't care much for. For example, we’ve made a transition to hyper-converged technology, which is moving more towards provisioning and being smaller and more agile. Zerto requires these thick provision walls for virtual machines that are always running. I know that they're temporary. However, they're constantly running and they eat up a lot more disk space than they need to. Maybe if there was a little more of a stronger relationship with VMware and how they operate, some of that could be better managed.

I've been using the solution for three or four months.

It's scalable. If we need more, we just ask for more. If we need less, we scale it down.

We're already looking at how we can leverage it on other sites. To do so, we simply just buy a few licenses, deploy a couple of VMs, and then it's off to the races.

The size of our current environment is about 40 terabytes of virtual machines that we are protecting.

We've never had to contact technical support. 

Our experience with the initial setup was easy. It took 15 minutes. 

We leveraged a third party for deployment. The person we hired wasn't that technical, and only knew the basics. However, it was so easy we really didn't need him.

We're still waiting on the ROI. However, it will be very easy to calculate the minute we have a failover. 

The pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward. You license what you use. 

We also evaluated VMware's cyber recovery manager. We chose Zerto due to the fact VMware’s solution was very complicated, very difficult to use, and required a lot more effort to be able to set it up and make sure that it worked. There was a lot of debugging to make sure things were working properly. Whereas Zerto was almost effortless. I was able to implement Zerto within minutes. Without exaggerating, within ten minutes I already started replicating.

The solution just works. It works in the background and it is very hands-off. Once you set it, it just goes. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We use Zerto for disaster recovery as a service and site-to-site migrations. 

Zerto enables us to do sandboxing failovers. You can run tests on a production environment in a sandbox and spin up a copy of your actual production environment in a few hours. When you're done with it, you can click a couple of buttons, and it's all blown away. You don't need to worry about reverting changes or interfering with your on-prem production environments.

The most valuable feature is the overview Zerto gives you, providing quick insights into where your VMs are and whether they're replicating. It's an easy interface to work with. Configuring Zerto to failover in Azure is pretty simple. The biggest challenge is moving from on-prem to the cloud, but that's not an issue with Zerto. The problem is the difference in hypervisors.

I would like to see some improvements with APIs going into the cloud so that they can more natively orchestrate the migration point-to-point without special hands-on configuration. Azure does some of that natively by having an agent on the VM, but Zerto could improve on its APIs into Azure or Google so that spinning up works more natively in that environment. It would make things smoother. 

I've been using Zerto for about a year now.

I haven't faced any stability issues. The only problems I've had have been self-inflicted, so it's pretty good.

Zerto's scalability seems pretty robust. I've had a few larger VMs that have been a little troublesome in terms of the RTO, but they are also outside of best practices. There should be no issues with scalability if you're working within the defined parameters of what's acceptable.

I rate Zerto support nine out of 10. I've used their support pretty extensively. I would say the majority of the experiences have been overwhelmingly positive. Their response times and issue resolutions are satisfactory.  

One thing I would change about Zerto support is the fact that you sometimes can't find the answer you need online. Sometimes, Zerto reaches out with an answer to that particular issue, and it's in a document that the customers can't access without going through support. It doesn't feel like that information should be limited to internal use. I should be able to find that online without going through a support channel. 

Positive

I've also used Azure's native Azure Site Recovery solution, and there are definitely some benefits to using Zerto, such as the fact that it works at a hypervisor host level over individual VMs with agents. The performance is probably a little better in most cases. 

Zerto is easier to use than ASR overall, but the setup is a little bit more involved. After the installation, the daily use is pretty simple compared to Azure. With Azure's native solution, there's a lot more that you must do repeatedly throughout the lifecycle of any virtual machine or system that you're trying to protect. Zerto is much simpler in that regard.

The on-prem deployment is super easy and works well. Migrating from on-prem to the cloud involves a lot more steps and things you have to configure so that it can communicate into the cloud and build everything that it needs to. That takes more time. It probably requires twice as much time to deploy on the cloud. 

We see the biggest ROI from Zerto's real-time test environment. If we want to do a proof of concept on a hundred servers, we can spin them up within a few hours and have them ready to start testing stuff with real data to see how that might look if we were to deploy that into production. It's an excellent, accurate test environment that we don't need to maintain.

Zerto's pricing is competitive, given the benefits and ease of setting it up. It may seem more expensive upfront, but you're going to save that over the long term by spending less engineering time configuring, reconfiguring, etc.

I rate Zerto nine out of ten.

Our primary use case is for disaster recovery. We replicate up to Azure, and that's essentially disaster recovery as a service.

Overall, the effects of RPO have been great. They are never more than a minute or two, even throughout the production day.

If we can replicate from our native VMware environment up to native Azure, it converts the machines for us. We don't have to maintain another VMware environment somewhere. It's really given us the ability to eliminate the entire data center.

Moreover, there are cost savings tied to this. We don't pay for the rack space, power, or hardware; all of that is gone. Because the machines aren't active, all we're paying for is storage in Azure. So it has saved us quite a bit of money.

Zerto's near-synchronous certification has positively impacted our operations. Any recovery point that's too far in the past, we'll lose transactions when we fail over. We really don't want to do that. Real-time replication gives us a much better sense of security for the enterprise. It simplifies things for us and reduces costs.  It makes management feel really good, too.

Using DR in a cloud environment has been a positive experience. We're saving money. We don't have to maintain the hardware. We don't have the rack space at the other data center. It just simplifies things for us and reduces costs. It's been a positive experience overall. It's pretty easy to use. Once it's up and running, it stays running. We have had a few times when we called support and the support has been very, very good.

Maybe the reporting for the failover test could be a little better.

I have been using Zerto since 2020, so it's been three years.

It's very good. It's very stable. It doesn't require a lot of intervention. 

We haven't had any problems with scalability. We have 75 machines protected by Zerto and it does a fine job.  

Support has been very good.

Positive

We used to use Site Recovery Manager when we had two data centers, and it was VMware to VMware. We were using EMC storage. Zerto is a lot easier to use than Site Recovery Manager. It requires less care and feeding. 

Site Recovery Manager occasionally would lose virtual machines, and it was kind of a pain, but Zerto just kept running. So overall, we're really happy with the switch to Zerto.

The initial setup was easy.

Since we don't have to maintain all of the hardware and the second data center, one person can manage the entire Azure environment by themselves. As a result,  Zerto has helped us reduce staff. 

We did an assisted setup with Zerto tech on the line, and It was really painless. It was simple and straightforward. The initial process including getting the servers and everything set up, was pretty short. The process included getting the VMs all added to the recovery groups and things like that. 

The whole process from start to finish took less than a week.

It has proven to be a cost-effective solution for us. 

It could always be less money. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. It requires little care and feeding. Not a lot goes wrong with it. It just works.

We are using it for disaster recovery. We have recovery point objectives (RPOs) for our ERP systems, financial systems, and real estate systems.

We only use it for on-prem disaster recovery. We are not using it for the cloud.

When we replicated our data, I turned up the machine, and it was up in seconds. It blew my mind. I could not believe it. We made a change to the database and tried to bring it back, but it did not work. I was floored by how quickly the system came up, but unfortunately, I need to get the rest of it working. We have not spent a tremendous amount of time on it. We are stuck, and we have not been able to play around with the full features of the system.

Unfortunately, we have not been able to get it to be fully functional. We were able to replicate and turn up a VM, but we were not able to bring the VM back because my team was spread thin. However, we worked with tech support and got the VM back.

I have been using Zerto for one year. 

We have not been running it long enough to see its stability.

I have a small group of virtual machines. If I buy more licenses, I am sure it would work just as well. We have fifteen VMs for our core production, financial systems, and real estate systems.

I did not work directly with them. My systems engineer worked with them, and he was not tremendously impressed. He had called their support, and the impression that I got from the engineer was that they had never seen that before, and they did not know.

We purchased VMware Site Recovery Manager, but we made a lot of hardware changes. I never got it working, and I stopped paying for the licensing. I cannot compare Zerto with VMware Site Recovery Manager because I never got VMware Site Recovery Manager working, so I did not use it.

We went for Zerto because we wanted something from a reputable company that I know works and that I can get up and running with the recovery point objectives that they advertise. I was impressed when I brought it up. It met my expectations.

We paid Zerto to help us get it installed, and we paid for the quick start. However, I did not read the contract closely. The person was very helpful, but unfortunately, we did not understand that we had a limited period of time. When we went to ask for support, they said sorry and asked us to buy more hours. That was our fault. It was not explained properly, but I cannot blame Zerto because we just did not read it all. It was a line item on the contract. It was not until they said that I only had six months that I pulled up the documentation, and it was a line item off to the side that said that we had six months total for the start-up, so we did not get the environment fully set up.

When we worked with the quick start engineer, he made some recommendations about setting up a test environment. He made some recommendations here or there, but it failed to launch. When we were working with the engineer, we had some of the same problems that we had after deployment. For example, in some cases, some test machines would never boot up. We then had to redo it and do some other VM. Even at the time when we were working with the engineer, we could not bring it back, and we never resolved the issue because the time expired. Some of that is on us. We get pulled in different directions, and I did not understand the limitation. 

I have not yet seen an ROI. I will see it when I resolve my issues, and I can bring my entire environment over and get it up and running.

I do not have anything to compare it to. It is expensive, but I am not going to squabble about the price when I bring the system up in a disaster. It is what it is.

We did not evaluate other solutions.

At this time, I would rate Zerto a five out of ten. I was extremely impressed at how I was able to bring that system up, but because I have not been able to bring it back, I am in the middle. Once I can bring it back, I will be super impressed and rate it a ten, but right now, I am right in the middle. It worked great for a minute.

We had a specific use case for one of our clients that had a regulatory requirement for backups to be further than what we were already able to give with our current backup structure. We are actually a global company and our global headquarters are in Northern Ireland. We're located in Pennsylvania. We're the North American headquarters. We implemented Zerto, and we replicate on our Northern Ireland site. That got us more business with our clients.

We needed to meet the requirements of the client, and, previous to this solution, we would not have been able to meet the distance. That's why we implemented it.

The journaling is the most valuable aspect of the solution. The near synchronous authentication is great. It's critical for our organization.

We haven't had to use Zerto for blocking threats, however, we like that we have it as an option.

We do not do disaster recovery in the cloud or the AWS platform. It can do it. We just don't opt to use it that way.

We've used the solution to protect virtual machines.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. Our RPOs are eight seconds. It blows past RPOs out of the water. It's great.

The speed of recovery is excellent. We've only had to test it and never used it in production. That said, it works better than anything we've used previously. 

It's easy to migrate data. 

Its ability to keep users collaborating during a data migration is good. It goes very quickly, so it's not a disruption.

The impact on our RTOs is great. It far exceeds what we've needed it to do.

It will save us time in a data recovery situation.

It's helped us reduce our DR testing. It has gone from hours to minutes under Zerto.

It enables us to make better use of our staff. We have reduced the number of staff involved in overall DR management. 

Their data backup and restore have some ways to go. We looked at replacing our traditional backup system with Zerto and found it was lacking about a year ago. We have Commvault, which is very customizable and feature-rich in comparison. Their offering needs to be more robust.

I have used the solution for close to six years.

The stability is great. We haven't had any issues with it. 

The scalability is very good. It can scale out to quite a lot of VMs.

I've contacted technical support once or twice. It was for integration and customization and they've been great.

Positive

I was involved in the initial setup, which was very straightforward. It took about a day to set up. Two people were involved in the deployment.

The only maintenance is the annual upgrade. It's pretty much set and forget.

We handled the setup with the help of Zerto.

It's hard to quantify the ROI. 

The pricing is pretty fair. It's competitive.

We did look into VMware. It didn't meet our requirements.

The solution has not replaced any of our legacy backup systems.

It hasn't helped us to reduce downtime, as we haven't had any yet.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The only issue is that someone would move the VMs involved around. If you have a global team, make sure they understand the strategy and everyone is on the same page so that issues like that don't arise. We had silos on our side and once we dealt with that, we were fine.