HPE Zerto Software Reviews

In most of the companies where I have seen HPE Zerto Software deployed, it is primarily used for DCDR purposes. It is very easy to test failover during audits to demonstrate the capability to auditors, and during disaster recovery scenarios, it is very easy to failover from one site to another. HPE Zerto Software is quite a GUI-friendly tool.

The failover feature in HPE Zerto Software is quite easy and intuitive, and the best part is that once your workload is migrated to another DR site, it automatically picks up the VLAN and gets powered up so your production is up and running there.

Sometimes the virtual private group that is created in HPE Zerto Software is sluggish. Searching all the VMs, categorizing it, and filtering it are areas where HPE can enhance more to make it more user-friendly.

The live synchronous feature is what gets used everywhere in HPE Zerto Software. The workload VM and the DR VM are in live synchronous mode at all times, with approximately seven milliseconds of latency, so both workloads are in near-sync.

HPE Zerto Software has made operations quite easy. Before using it, there was manual intervention required for everything. For example, with the SRT tool I used previously, I had to migrate VMs from the DC to DR for DR testing and then power them on manually, attach them to the correct VLAN, and handle all those configurations myself.

On many occasions when there are slowness issues in one of the regions, we need to quickly migrate workloads to another paired site, and we use HPE Zerto Software for that purpose. Otherwise, I would have to power off servers, procure new servers to support those workloads, migrate them to a newer server, coordinate with the network team to configure VLANs, handle DNS configurations, and manage many other tasks. With HPE Zerto Software, none of this is necessary, and instead I can use it to migrate workloads to the paired site.

The virtual private group that is created in HPE Zerto Software is sometimes sluggish. Searching all the VMs, categorizing them, and filtering them are areas where HPE can enhance more to make the interface more user-friendly.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for more than three years now, as it was being used in my previous company and continues to be used in my current company.

HPE Zerto Software is pretty much up and running consistently. Every time I access it to check anything, it is always up and running. Unless the underlying infrastructure is having some issue, HPE Zerto Software from the OS perspective and VM perspective is quite stable.

I cannot comment much on scalability based on my experience, but for the workloads I have seen, there are more than 100 to 150 plus servers that are being kept in synchronization at all times, and I think HPE Zerto Software is quite stable for that scale.

The customer service is quite fast and responsive. I would rate them a nine because sometimes it took time for them to understand what my issue was, but once they grasped it, they were swift to respond.

I have used the SimpliVity recovery tool, which is also being used here. The SRT tool does the same thing, but it is very basic and not as rich as HPE Zerto Software is. Many times it needs manual intervention for tool maintenance.

With HPE Zerto Software, I have not seen anything our team needs to do on the HPE Zerto Software end because I have used it for more than three years in my previous company and here as well, and no maintenance has been required as far as I know.

Recovery time objective and recovery point objective are important metrics. HPE Zerto Software is something that is quick and fast in achieving these. The live synchronous feature always keeps my workload in synchronization, so anytime a disaster happens or any sort of incident occurs, my workload is up and running on the other side. Users working with and utilizing the systems do not feel any difference in the backend.

HPE Zerto Software is very easy to learn. The HPE Zerto Software website has proper documentation similar to how VMware provides an HOL lab to try out and test products. HPE Zerto Software provides very elaborate documentation with guided steps, and they even provide basic certification to start with. The GUI that they have makes it very easy to understand.

For everything, I would rate HPE Zerto Software an eight overall. It is a quite good and rich tool. I do not understand why every other company is not using it more often. HPE Zerto Software is now into the cloud as well, so if you want to have a DCDR setup with your DR in the cloud and DC on-premises, you can use HPE Zerto Software during your disaster recovery situation. However, I think this capability is very little marketed.

My overall rating for this review is eight out of ten.

On-premises

My use case is basically disaster recovery with the multi-cloud support. That's the main use case that we have.

The best features are the journaling as a feature, as well as it being multi-cloud. That's the other best feature about HPE Zerto Software.

The near-synchronous replication does replicate in real-time. That's another great feature of HPE Zerto Software. The asynchronous replication is valuable because I tried to understand the journaling behind it, and that's one of the wonderful features about it.

Regarding the impact on RTOs and RPOs, definitely, all because of the backend technology, it has really saved my RTOs and RPOs for any kind of recovery. Otherwise, we would have to be very specific about RTOs and RPOs for each and every application. Journaling is one thing which is a good feature about it.

HPE Zerto Software has reduced our organization's DR testing, saving around thirty to forty percent time for us.

The documentation is very good. The GUI is kind of an old one. More development on the GUI can be useful for the users.

The areas that have room for improvement include the GUI. The other thing is the VRA portion which is required to be installed on each and every ESXi. A better integration might help us for the VRA monitoring. That might be one of the useful features.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for around five years.

On the stability front, I rate it nine out of ten.

For scalability, it's fairly fine. I rate it nine out of ten.

HPE Zerto Software requires some maintenance, and that's the time when the maintenance has to take place when we go for the upgrade.

In terms of maintenance, that's fairly fine.

From one to ten, I rate their technical support ten out of ten. I have had a very nice experience working with HPE Zerto Software.

When I compare HPE Zerto Software with other solutions like Veeam, Rubrik, and Commvault, every product has their fair advantages, but HPE Zerto Software has an added advantage in that it is not only a backup solution, it's a replication solution also. Plus, it does give you the multi-cloud kind of support.

I have seen a return on investment of maybe around thirty to forty percent after using HPE Zerto Software for five years.

HPE Zerto Software has helped with RTOs and RPOs maybe around thirty percent.

In terms of pricing, I'll not say HPE Zerto Software is very cheap, and I'll not say that whatever features it provides, it's very highly priced. However, there could be room for negotiation on the basis of features what a customer is looking for. Because it comes with a lot of features, futuristic licenses might be helpful.

The challenge I was trying to solve with implementing HPE Zerto Software was as a replication solution from one DC to multiple DCs. It's kind of one to many. That as an option is very good of HPE Zerto Software.

We have not come across the issue of data recovery due to ransomware or any other causes, but if that kind of situation comes up in the POC, we have seen it's been a remarkably nice set of solution for the recovery.

I prefer HPE Zerto Software.

I would recommend HPE Zerto Software to other users. In the POC, that's one thing that I can recommend. It also gives you a kind of hybrid model. That's also another reason why I will be recommending the solution. It's a one-stop solution for doing your disaster recovery, irrespective of what cloud you are running.

We do use a Cyber Vault solution or immutable data copies to recover from attacks.

My thoughts on the integration capabilities overall is that it's awesome. This is one of the best features about HPE Zerto Software as for the integration part.

I rate this review nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure

The primary use case for HPE Zerto Software is disaster recovery. I use HPE Zerto Software to help protect VMs in my environment.

One of the most important features of HPE Zerto Software is the ability to easily recover systems based on the required point in time. The possibility to recover systems to the desired point in time while containing consistency within the whole application is significant.

My impression of its near-synchronous replication is that it covers the majority of all use cases. It cannot cover all scenarios and very sophisticated requirements, such as near-zero replication. However, in most cases, these capabilities are fully sufficient to have the system fully operational because I am aware that in case of a real issue or real disaster, there is always the loss of data. This is acceptable functionality in my opinion.

HPE Zerto Software is not reducing our DR testing because we have DR tests based on our policies and they are conducted periodically. However, the amount of time needed to perform DR exercises itself and the engagement of teams required to be present during the recovery test helps much and lowers the costs for the company. This software allows for almost fully automatic recovery, which means that the teams are required only for the verification phase, not during the entire recovery process. This also impacts the costs for DR exercise execution, meaning the costs are lower compared to the scenario when the team responsible for the application needs to recover the system from a backup solution.

In my opinion, it is hard to predict how HPE Zerto Software can be improved in the future because this software is used for a very specific purpose which it works fine for. This purpose is quite limited, so there are all required functionalities now provided by HPE Zerto Software within the application. It is possible to recover the virtual machines and recover pods from Docker solutions, for example. The application itself cannot recover physical servers, so I would point that out as a feature request that could be discussed by the HPE Zerto Software team as a new functionality, if possible.

Regarding specific security examples that made me decide to switch to HPE Zerto Software, I did not have security concerns. Before using HPE Zerto Software, we did not have the specific requirement from the security perspective to use such software. Probably now as there is DORA requirement, NIST, and NIS requirement. However, we were using this software before this law started, so we already used this software.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for almost 10 years.

I am generally very pleased with the technical support provided by HPE, so I would rate it a 10.

Positive

Unfortunately, I do not use any other software in this approach because we have only HPE Zerto Software. Therefore, I do not have experience with any competitors, such as Veeam, Rubrik, and others. I did not have the chance to use them in a normal production manner.

The initial setup of HPE Zerto Software is not complicated; it is very simple. You have everything from an infrastructure perspective prepared, so you have the privileges configured on the hypervisor solution, along with all components such as network, storage, capacity, and CPU prepared. The installation itself lasts one to two hours at most. After the initial installation, it is only the configuration for the production workload, depending on needs and scenarios and how many systems you have in protection. From my understanding, the initial configuration and installation are very easy and smooth based on my experience. However, some preparation is required, but this is normal for any solution, not just for HPE Zerto Software.

I am not able to estimate the cost of downtime. However, let me imagine that a typical application recovery process lasts two to three hours and it takes two to three persons to be involved in this process. Let me assume that such engagement is not for one application but for 100 applications. Then let me compare it to the situation when you have all these systems protected with HPE Zerto Software and one person is able to recover their systems in minutes and only asks the application teams to verify if it is working fine after recovery. This causes huge numbers of FTE engaged in the DR process, whether in simulations or the real disaster recovery process, measured in many hours compared to minutes that can even be done in parallel. I think the return of value is huge. This is based on not only one action but comparing activities performed four times a year because of the policies requiring such exercises, which many teams are involved in.

I can confirm that HPE Zerto Software has reduced downtime in various situations, and it has reduced, as I mentioned previously, the engagement of the teams required to recover their systems.

Comparing HPE Zerto Software's recovery speed to competitors, I cannot compare what is the time required to recover the systems. However, compared to backups, as this is the initial way to recover systems after failures, it is much faster because it is measured in minutes to recover systems. Compared to traditional backup solutions, it is much faster.

I assess HPE Zerto Software's overall effect on my RPOs by stating that we use it both in simulations, meaning the DR exercises, which we perform periodically in our production environment. As it is, the DR exercise is controlled, which means that we have no loss of data in that case. However, we also had examples of using the software during a real disaster that happened in our infrastructure, and it also worked fine. The RPO requirements were met during the recovery actions, so for us, it proved that it worked fine.

Regarding the pricing of HPE Zerto Software, I find it reasonable. I rate this review a 10.

On-premises

Other

My main use case for HPE Zerto Software is the replication of data to a DR site.

HPE Zerto Software has helped tremendously with my organization's RTO and RPO, bringing it down to an hour rather than taking 12 hours to restore data the traditional way. 

When we were trying to bring the disaster recovery side up, we had an issue with the VMs not coming up. We had to go back and restore. The solution has saved me time in data recovery situations. During DR tests, we were bringing the site up within the first couple of hours. With a different solution I previously used, it would have taken 24 hours to 4 hours to recover.

HPE Zerto Software has helped me reduce my organization's DR testing. Instead of three times, we do it once. Rather than spending time preparing for the test configuration to do a full restore, with HPE Zerto Software replication, it's automatically up within an hour, and then we can start our testing.

The feature of HPE Zerto Software that I appreciate the most is its ease of use. This feature has helped tremendously in getting our DR plan easy to implement. 

My impressions of HPE Zerto's near-synchronous replication are very good. Near-synchronous replication is very important to my organization, and we are using it every day. It works consistently.

HPE Zerto Software could be improved in the future with easier upgrades. I am not aware of any additional features I would like to see included in the next release.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for a long time.

I would assess the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software as very stable. I have experienced some issues sometimes during upgrades. Other than that, it runs smoothly.

I have expanded usage, and the process was smooth.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as second-hand support since I am not the primary customer for HPE Zerto. I use them through my DR services. I would rate the customer service and technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, I was using regular recovery and backup restore systems to address similar needs.

Deployment of HPE Zerto Software was streamlined. It worked quickly and sufficiently.

I have seen a return on investment with HPE Zerto Software. Fast restores are a notable example. It saves us a lot of time and gives us the ability to perform other DR plans for other systems.

It's provided by the DR replication vendor, so it's not a direct cost to us.

We are considering a cyber vault solution as part of our infrastructure. When choosing a cyber vault solution, the capabilities that are most important to us are fast recovery against ransomware and the ability to do multiple checkpoints. 

My advice to another organization considering HPE Zerto Software is to go for it.

I would rate HPE Zerto Software a nine out of ten.

On-premises

I used HPE Zerto Software for replication of virtual machines. I can speak about one special case with one of my customers in the past. This was based in a VMware environment to replicate the most critical virtual machines to the secondary data center, and also to run several tests during the year. The solution was fantastic because it performed correctly and we could recover in the secondary data center. I have used HPE Zerto Software to help protect virtual machines.

My favorite feature of HPE Zerto Software is the journal functionality. Because we can recover the virtual machine at the last replication, but we can also recover using the journal to recover the virtual machine before a specific event, for example before ransomware. If we have detected the ransomware at one point in time, we can recover before this event.

I think HPE Zerto Software's near-synchronous replication is the best in the market for replication. In my opinion, I checked other tools like Veeam and others, and this is the best because it's a specific tool to run disaster recovery and works at one hundred percent.

What I dislike about HPE Zerto Software is maybe the reporting. The reporting is basic. Some customers want specific reports, and we have to connect to other third parties or third tools to extract the information. Maybe this is something that HPE Zerto Software should work on and improve.

Using HPE Zerto Software helps to reduce DR testing because the DR test works properly. However, customers want to get a runbook for the DR test. We can recover virtual machines in order using HPE Zerto Software, but we cannot create dependencies between machines. If we run this first machine, then we could recover machines A, B, C, D in sequence. This is something that customers have requested in the past.

I have been working with HPE Zerto Software for four years.

In my experience with HPE Zerto Software, we do not have any kind of issues.

Talking about the scalability of HPE Zerto Software, it's proper in my market. I'm not sure about enterprise accounts because I remember they have some stoppers since we can scale to several virtual appliances. But in my market and with my customers, it worked properly.

I contacted HPE Zerto Software support and it was good.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give a score of eight to the support of HPE Zerto Software.

The overall support quality and the speed of answers from HPE Zerto Software is standard in the rest of the vendors. It depends on if the case is critical or not, but in my opinion, it's the standard in the market.

Deploying HPE Zerto Software is very easy.

It took me time to deploy HPE Zerto Software for the first time.

I only had to review the virtual appliance and also check with an HPE Zerto Software presales representative. After that first attempt, I could do it by myself and it worked fantastically.

For the deployment of HPE Zerto Software, we need two persons: one from the partner in my case and in my role, and also one from the customer.

About the pricing of HPE Zerto Software, I'm not sure because I don't remember what the price is. In the past, it was expensive. Not much expensive, but more expensive than other vendors. I tried to close some deals, and the customer felt the solution was good and they wanted it, but they discarded it for financial reasons. Other solutions cover similar functionality but not the same RPO or enhancements. They decided from the financial side and discarded HPE Zerto Software, and maybe this is something to change.

In the past, I used alternatives to HPE Zerto Software such as VMware Replication and also Veeam Backup or Veeam Replication. I used these two options.

My overall experience in this field is two years.

The overall effect of HPE Zerto Software on my RPOs is that the RPO is the minimum that I know with the other vendors. We can recover the virtual machines near to zero, near in seconds. We have to recover the vital virtual machine with the last change in seconds.

HPE Zerto Software has helped me to reduce downtime in various situations.

For example, with the same customer from before, the recovery only takes minutes for the critical machines to be recovered in the secondary data center. The vital machine can start and we can test it and confirm it's working properly and also run the failback. In my opinion, it's fantastic.

I would rate this review a seven out of ten.

On-premises

Other

We use it for disaster recovery purposes. Since Zerto offers a near recovery point objective recovery, we utilize it to validate our servers from one location to another.

By implementing Zerto, we wanted to ensure that in the event of a disaster or ransomware, we are able to recover and not lose any significant amount of data.

Zerto is very easy to use. Installation is about half an hour, and then it starts protecting the data and VMs. It is not very cumbersome. The UI is built very well. It is fairly self-explanatory. To be able to stand up a product you have never seen in half an hour and get it functioning and protecting speaks to how good the UI and workflow are.

Zerto has near-synchronous replication. As a change is made on site A, it gets copied across the network to site B. We are five or six seconds behind production. If I have a heavily used system and I use traditional backups, I could be anywhere from 5 minutes to 23 hours behind. With Zerto, I am single-digit seconds behind. That works well for us.

Our disaster recovery test, which used to span an entire week, now takes two days. We used to recover our servers in the first two or three days with a backup product and then test for two days before tearing it all down. Now, we spend half a day on new servers and ensuring things work with networking, etc. We test the next day, and we are done in two days. Across the entire company, we are able to save significant man-hours by shortening the test from a week to two days. We are now doing smaller tests once a month and larger tests once a year.

Zerto has reduced our DR testing time by 60% to 70%. We are also able to do more disaster recovery testing. Previously, we were doing it once a year, whereas now, we are doing smaller tests once a month and our large tests once a year.

In recovery point objectives, we are single-digit seconds behind. In terms of RTOs, I can recover 350 VMs in 30 minutes. It takes less than several seconds to restore a single VM. From days to 30 minutes for 350 compared to 100 VMs is an incredible time-saving in terms of RTOs and RPOs for us.

I find it easy to use, and the UI is really easy to navigate. We reduced our time with backups from days to less than half an hour for the same data service. 

The best aspect of Zerto is being able to test any day, any time. It provides a quick look to ensure everything is functioning correctly from site A to site B. 

I would like to see different reporting options than what is currently available. I would like to be able to grab different data points that do not currently exist in the reporting system. 

I would also like to see more of a runbook or playbook for using Zerto. If I have 350 objects that I am protecting, I would like Zerto to be able to fire them up in one order, rather than having to manually bring them up in a sequence.

I have used the solution for at least six years.

It is very stable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

It is scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

The servers and VMs that we are protecting are across different business units. We have three people who are the administrators of the solution. 120 people were the testers, but there are only three full-time admins for it.

I would definitely rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I was using BMC Avamar Virtual Edition, which is really a BRS kind of product versus a disaster recovery product.

It is very easy to deploy. For us, the initial setup takes about half an hour.

In terms of maintenance, the most that we ever had to do with Zerto was install a patch. When there is a new patch, we give it a couple of months to make sure there are no other issues that pop up, but it is normal patching. We do not have to babysit it. We log in and get it done, and it just does what it is supposed to do.

Determining ROI is tough. In terms of man-hours, in the last disaster test, we had 120 users in the system. If we did that over a week, it would be 120 times 5 days. With 10-hour days, that is 6,000 man-hours. We now do it in 8-hour days or 1,920 hours. We are talking about a 4,080-hour difference between the old and new ways of doing things.

We feel it is pretty cost-efficient. For the amount of protection that we get for Zerto, we feel that it is at an excellent price point, especially compared to some of the other vendors that were just backup solutions. For all that it does, we feel that the price is good.

We dabbled in RecoverPoint a long time ago. At that time, RecoverPoint was specifically for physical machines and not virtual machines. The complexities with RecoverPoint and SRM, and having to manage two or three different products, made Zerto much more attractive. I am changing IP addresses, doing recovery, and replication all in Zerto. It is an all-in-one product, eliminating the need for two or three other things from different vendors.

It is also vendor agnostic, which is not the case with some other vendors. I can have HPE on one side and Pure on the other side for storage. I can have VMware on one side and Hyper-V potentially on the other side. Zerto can move data from site A to B. It does not care what we are using for servers or storage.

I would absolutely recommend Zerto. It is almost the only product in its market space that provides what it promises, such as near real-time replication and protection. The cost is very reasonable. There is no reason not to suggest Zerto for disaster recovery and ransomware protection. 

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

On-premises

Our use case is disaster recovery replication.

We primarily use it for the automation orchestration for disaster recovery. We were looking for a solution that could do individual virtual machine replication failover and failback, and Zerto provided that.

We conduct DR tests biannually. With Zerto, our DR tests go much faster. Orchestration is much better. Previously, these events took two to four hours, and they are now down to under fifteen minutes. The speed of the DR test is better. Accuracy is better. Everything is faster all around. It has saved 15% to 25% of time.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. Right now, our recovery is in seconds of several critical VMs. There is more than a 95% reduction in RPO and RTO time. It has been significant.

We also have more accuracy. There is about a 50% improvement. Human error has decreased by 50% as well. Things seem to be going a little bit better. We are working on more scripting and automation so that we get to the eventual goal of push-button. Right now, engineers have to push buttons within the Zerto console, but we are trying to work on full automation orchestration so that we can get it down to five minutes from fifteen minutes.

Zerto has saved downtime by 25%. From a quantification standpoint, there are 15% to 20% cost savings.

We are using anti-ransomware approaches on Zerto as well as data protection backup and primary storage, so at this time, Zerto has not saved time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes, but we are investigating use cases for anti-ransomware recovery.

Zerto is quite central to our IT resiliency strategy. Several of our big customers require it. DR is a service that we sell, so it is pretty important for us.

Many aspects of Zerto are valuable, such as the automation and orchestration features. The dashboarding shows recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives, indicating seconds or minutes remaining, which is useful. 

The ease of installation and use of virtual replication adapters on hosts is beneficial. The ability to simulate a disaster recovery failover commit and see what the results are going to be before we perform the commit is valuable.

Near-synchronous replication has some trade-offs. With near-synchronous replication, we get almost all the information up to date at the destination site, but the trade-off is that sometimes that could take a lot of CPU cycles, network bandwidth, and troubleshooting. A few versions back with Zerto, there were some bugs in the software that were causing constant replication back and forth that was driving a lot of network bandwidth utilization over the network, and we did not know why until we found out it was a bug. It depends on what your business or application really requires. If it requires near-synchronous, you have to enable that. However, if Zerto can make it easier or have a smaller footprint by sending larger payloads or having network compression, it will be a little bit easier. On wide area networks and local area networks, that would definitely be preferred.

We have had some issues running Linux virtual machines on the new version. There were some issues with virtual replication adapters on Cisco UCS hosts running VMware vCenter 8. There were several things we had to do with installation and getting the replication adapters to work. Integration with Keycloak for Active Directory authentication using new Linux VMs was challenging, but it is now functioning well.

I have been using the solution for more than three years personally, and the company has been using it for five or ten years.

I would rate the stability a solid nine or ten. There have not been many bugs. It has been running perfectly.

I would rate the scalability at about a seven out of ten. There is room for improvement, but that is also applicable to our side. We should slice and dice our databases into smaller chunks so that Zerto can get them replicated. Customers need to follow good engineering practices for optimal product use. It is not fully a Zerto problem; it is a shared responsibility.

It is being used at multiple locations. We are a small to medium-sized organization. We have two IT administrators working on it. We have about 200 to 500 users.

I would rate their technical support a ten out of ten. The team is really good, especially when we get someone from Ukraine. They have a very good Ukrainian support team. We sometimes request those guys specifically because they know the product in and out.

Positive

We have used other solutions, such as Commvault. We have used remote replication from other data protection backup vendors like Cohesity, which did not have a lot of automation. We tried using NetApp SnapCenter, but it did not have the level of automation that Zerto did. I find Zerto to be the fastest, easiest, and least complex solution compared to others.

I was not involved in the initial deployment. In terms of maintenance, it is not too bad. Getting everything migrated from the old version to the new version took some cycles and time. It just runs in the background with minimal upkeep.

I believe the return on investment is 15% to 25% because disaster recovery is a service that we sell to customers. We are able to do it quickly, efficiently, and accurately with replicable processes and resilience.

It is cost-efficient because we have perpetual licenses. We are a small to medium-sized business, so cost is a pretty big important factor. Being cost-efficient with perpetual licensing is a key factor.

I would recommend Zerto to others for high availability, scalability, near-real-time synchronous replication, ease of use, VM stability, and competitive pricing.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

On-premises

My main use case for HPE Zerto Software is BCDR. 

By implementing this solution, we were trying to solve BCDR challenges and needed a vendor-agnostic solution.

The feature I appreciate most about HPE Zerto Software is its journal-based replication, which is a faster replication technology than what we had prior.

Overall, it has improved our RTO and RPO and reduced the engineering time spent during regularly scheduled DR exercises.

When failing over virtual machines (VMs), where VLANs aren't spanned across geographical data centers, it's essential to change the IP address of replicated VMs. The mechanism used to control and configure this process could be improved for customers with restrictions on DHCP usage.

Additionally, there are nuances to consider when dealing with Linux systems.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for three years.

HPE Zerto Software has had some issues, such as storage problems and logs filling up, but they were resolved by support.

Our replicated workloads are mostly static. We have not needed to scale our implementation, yet.

Their support team didn’t have all the answers, and some of the cases took far too long to address, especially on critical systems that needed to be operational before our scheduled DR events.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support of HPE Zerto Software as probably a five out of ten. 

Neutral

Before adopting HPE Zerto Software, we were using a vendor-specific technology. We considered the change to HPE Zerto Software due to performance and the need to use multiple hypervisors.

Deploying HPE Zerto Software was pretty streamlined, but there have been some challenges with the support organization. There were instances where additional resources were needed to address cases, and the time to bring them on was longer than expected.

We were able to consolidate tools with HPE Zerto. That yielded a meaningful amount of cost savings for us.

My experience with the pricing and licensing of HPE Zerto Software is that it was more affordable than our previously used technologies.

My advice to another organization considering HPE Zerto Software is to get a good contact within the account team to ensure a quick path to escalation exists. 

Potential customers should be aware that Zerto does not support all hypervisors in the market. So, depending on your footprint, Zerto may or may not be a fit for your long-term virtualization strategy.

I would rate HPE Zerto Software a seven out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure

My main use case for HPE Zerto Software is to achieve disaster recovery.

I can provide a quick specific example of how I use HPE Zerto Software for disaster recovery in my environment. It is very good software to achieve disaster recovery because it provides very low RTO and RPO. We have multiple critical systems in our environment, and we try to find the best scenario or best solution to get that result. With HPE Zerto Software, we achieve those numbers. We did scenarios for drills and carried out real scenarios for disaster recovery, and HPE Zerto Software was the best approach to go with.

In the beginning, we faced some issues during failover and failback. Sometimes HPE Zerto Software did not remove or delete the folder for machines in the main site, and when you fail back, it causes conflicts if the folder name still exists. When you fail back, HPE Zerto Software just adds a suffix to that new virtual machine, which causes issues with backups or when you want to migrate the data store for those virtual machines. After failover, you have to make sure to search for any existing files and change or delete them. This is the big issue that arose from HPE Zerto Software; otherwise, it has been a very good solution.

The best features HPE Zerto Software offers are that it is very easy to use, and it is not complex software. I can do the installation and start the implementation for the virtual machine to replicate and for the disaster recovery site in maybe just one day. It does not take much time for me to understand how this software works; it is very good and easy to manage.

The simplicity of how easy it is to use and set up HPE Zerto Software really helps me day to day. Compared to other tools I have tried, HPE Zerto Software was easy to install the management server. They provide an OVA, and you simply need to add some information, such as server name and IPs, and open some ports. Then you install it on every ESXi in the main site and disaster recovery site, and that's it. You just need to add the virtual machine that you want to replicate.

Our team is very concerned about how we can achieve a disaster recovery scenario with our critical systems, which are based on security tools. With HPE Zerto Software, when we achieve that scenario to fail over and stay there for a long period, and then come back and fail back to the main site, it has had a huge positive impact on our management.

We have two topics to improve with HPE Zerto Software. First, when you fail over, you have to make sure that files for the existing virtual machine are cleaned up. Sometimes when we fail over, HPE Zerto Software deletes some files and keeps others, leading to disputes when failing back. Second, during failover, sometimes you have to ask HPE Zerto Software to shut down the virtual machine, and it can take a long time. HPE Zerto Software will wait for maybe one or two minutes, or sometimes five minutes. If the virtual machine doesn't shut down in that time, it just powers it back on and cancels the failover. These two things should be enhanced and developed to improve the process.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software since one year ago.

HPE Zerto Software is very stable.

HPE Zerto Software is really easy to scale. It can be done by extending the license or installing it for more hosts. I believe it offers very good scalability.

Sometimes I find very good engineers that support us and provide more information to help solve issues. Other times, it takes a long time with engineering to find a solution to problems. I would rate the customer support of HPE Zerto Software as seven out of ten.

Before switching to HPE Zerto Software, I used Veeam. Everything was fine, but to achieve a large number for RPO and RTO, switching to HPE Zerto Software was the only solution that could meet our needs.

HPE Zerto Software was easy to install the management server. They provide an OVA, and you simply need to add some information, such as server name and IPs, and open some ports. Then you install it on every ESXi in the main site and disaster recovery site, and that's it. You just need to add the virtual machine that you want to replicate. The simplicity really helps me day to day compared to other tools I have tried.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for HPE Zerto Software is that it was a little expensive. I have Veeam which we use for backup, and it has a replication feature that is much cheaper compared to HPE Zerto Software. HPE Zerto Software focuses solely on disaster recovery and replication, while Veeam provides backups, replications, and copies to other locations with multiple features at a lower price.

I don't remember all the options I evaluated before choosing HPE Zerto Software as it happened about a year ago. When I looked at other software, I found that HPE Zerto Software might be the best approach to meet our disaster recovery needs. After the POC, I confirmed it as the correct choice for our disaster recovery scenarios.

We achieved an RPO of just seconds for the systems, and when you fail over, it takes just three minutes, or maybe less than one minute for some systems. For others, it depends on how quickly you can shut down in the main site and fail over those systems. I would say three to four or five minutes maximum. For us, it was really no downtime or data loss.

I rate HPE Zerto Software as nine out of ten because, as I mentioned previously, it caused me some trouble during drills, which helped me learn how to deal with those issues. However, HPE Zerto Software deserves more; it is really very good software. If you are looking to achieve very good numbers with RTO and RPO and want to conduct smooth disaster recovery scenarios, I really advise you to use HPE Zerto Software.

On-premises

My main use cases for HPE Zerto Software involve active-passive application setups since I can't do an active-active; we do a standby and use Zerto to replicate that across to an alternate data center to practice as a DR. 

I practice it to migrate to new IPs as needed and things like that. I haven't experienced any ransomware issues yet, so I haven't had to use HPE Zerto Software in a data recovery situation. It wasn't applicable for our exercises against the CrowdStrike failure that impacted the entire world, however, we recovered from that in different ways. The only time we've actually had to use this as a DR event was during practice; we haven't had to use it as active DR since we have active-active solutions that rely on global traffic managers. 

The data is already in place; they just open up to see it in a different environment. So we haven't had to use it as DR, but in our DR practice, it has been working very effectively.

An example of how the replication feature has benefited my organization is when we were migrating from a legacy stack of hardware to a new stack using HPE Zerto Software. We were able to move hundreds of VMs at a time during a change window because the replication had already moved the data there; we just needed to cut over the active workload. It was as simple as turning it off, migrating, and turning it back on in a new space, which enabled us to run 200 plus applications in each change window during our migration from a 16-month deployment down to a three-month deployment.

The most valuable aspect of HPE Zerto Software is that it solves an impossible solution that VMware did not. We previously used a storage-based replication tool and coordinated with SRM for the cutover. That storage tool was no longer available when we started using VSAN. We no longer have a Fibre Channel system in the mix and were used to getting kind of DVR level, rolling it back to a millisecond to write-by-write level of recovery. VMware didn't have that available to us in vSphere replication, leaving us with a 10-minute choice while we needed sub-one minute. Zerto provides us with a seven-to-eight-second RTO and which allows us to meet the needs of our application teams with very sensitive applications.

The feature I appreciate the most about HPE Zerto Software is its fantastic replication and advanced problem-solving capabilities. We use it for both migration and DR.

It's easy to use; my POC took half a day to set up.

Zerto's near synchronous replication works very, very well. 

I hesitate to offer improvements for HPE Zerto Software since I appreciate it so much; the user interface is good, and the actual data under the hood is good. It keeps working, it's fast. 

However, it could benefit from tighter integration with VMware. They have a head start on proving that the new version will work. When cybersecurity events happen and we have a new release that we need to deploy quickly, they have a 90-day window to remediate that, but I need to deploy it before them, and I can't.

I've been using HPE Zerto Software for about two years.

I assess the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software as 100%.

HPE Zerto Software has been able to scale with our growing needs, and I've been happy with how it's been scaling; it's been smooth. The scaling has been smooth and satisfactory.

Customer support has always responded well when we have a problem, although that has gotten a little bit less since HPE purchased it. It was a bit better when it was Zerto before the acquisition; we get into the main queue more often now, but we can escalate very quickly.

Positive

Prior to adopting HPE Zerto Software, I used a combination solution with vSphere Replication and SRM alongside a Fibre Channel solution from EMC called the Virtual Replication Appliance. It had really good RTO, which we were trying to match with our new infrastructure, and the only solution we found to meet that need was HPE Zerto Software.

I would describe my experience with the deployment of HPE Zerto Software as very smooth and very easy.

It's hard to say if I've seen a return on investment; we haven't had anything break yet, so quantifying a return on investment for insurance is quite difficult. We have a solution that's ready to play, and we hope we never have to use it, similar to buying insurance on a house—you don't want to find out if it truly has to pay.

The setup cost for HPE Zerto Software was very favorable, and pricing wasn't much of an issue since it was the only choice available.

Before selecting HPE Zerto Software, the only other solution we considered was vSphere Replication with SRM; that was the only one that fit into our environment, and I don't care what its new name is since we're not using it.

Having a solid solution like HPE Zerto Software means we can effectively solve our DR problem. We can't reduce our DR testing since all our vital apps do it twice a year, and the less vital ones do it once a year. 

I am currently using a Cyber Vault solution or immutable data copies to ensure recovery from a cyber threat, integrated with the backup solution we have today, which is a Cohesity product they call Fort Knox. The approach for that is in the storage department's domain, and I leave them to do their own business. 

The most important capabilities for me when choosing a Cyber Vault solution would again be continuity, even though this is outside my scope. 

HPE Zerto Software hasn't yet reduced our downtime in any situation; we haven't had an event where it would be helpful. We've built in suspenders kind of things. We are managed service providers and use HPE Zerto Software on-prem with a private setup. We're not using any cloud providers for that; we have a cloud-at-customer solution.

Overall, I assess HPE Zerto Software as a product and would give it about a nine out of ten.

Private Cloud

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