HPE Zerto Software Reviews

We use Zerto to verify the information being transferred from one data center to another.

When a site is down, we can continue to use the other site thanks to Zerto.

The near-synchronous replication is extremely valuable because it ensures we can continue working.

The move action between the app and data center is great and we can see the benefits in minutes.

Our RPOs are performing well thanks to Zerto.

Migrating data using Zerto is easy.

Zerto helps our users collaborate during data migration.

Our RTO using Zerto is good.

The communication between the VM and the secondary data center is the most valuable feature.

I would like Zerto to provide more detailed information when there is an issue.

I have been using Zerto for five years.

Zerto is extremely stable. 

Zerto is scalable.

I have used the technical support of Zerto several times and they are good.

Positive

Though I wasn't part of the initial deployment, the procedure is relatively simple. Manager rollout is the first step, followed by CPG installation on VMs by the CPG teams and subsequent network configuration verification.

Four people are required for the deployment.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

Zerto is a good solution for transferring data between centers.

We primarily use Zerto for disaster recovery.

Zerto ensures a smooth transition during a disaster when we need to automatically switch from our primary environment to our recovery one. Zerto offers us disaster recovery in the cloud, which is essential because we don't need to pay upfront costs for infrastructure when doing the DR process. Zerto helps to protect our VM-based applications. 

The solution has also reduced our RPO. The RPO during testing was less than 15 minutes. Zerto reduces the amount of work we need to do because some of the steps are automated. It takes about five to 15 minutes to test. Zerto has decreased the number of staff needed for backup and DR. It only requires one or two. 

The core backup and disaster recovery features are the most valuable. The near-synchronous replication ensures we will be able to keep the business running if something happens. 

There's a mandatory VMware version, so we need to update our VMs in order to access our data. Zerto should work with all VMware versions. 

I rate Zerto nine out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Zerto eight out of 10 for scalability.

I rate Zerto support eight out of 10.

Positive

We are using Zerto and Acronis. 

Our IT team handled the deployment, but I don't think it was complicated. 

Zerto is a little expensive.

I rate Zerto eight out of 10. 

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.

I used Zerto in my last company for disaster recovery. It was a hospital, and now, I work for a bank where we use it for both disaster recovery and migration. We are doing a major migration.

Currently, we are doing disaster recovery only on-prem, but down the road, we will also go to the cloud. We are planning to go to Azure, but we do not know what we will actually use at that time.

We can recover a VM at any point. It probably takes five minutes, which is very important for us because if I lose my active node, I will have my production up in a couple of minutes.

We did reduce the migration time. I do not have a number, but it is better than VMware SRM. We are a big VMware shop, and we have now started buying HPE.

In terms of Zerto's effect on our RPO, I do not have the numbers because I am an implementation engineer, but the numbers should be good.

The migration and ease of use are valuable. It is easy to set up and easy to flip. We just need to click on Move. It can Re-IP at the same time. This is something very useful for us. Disaster recovery is also valuable. 

Its user interface is good. I have no complaints. The only complaint is that if I remove a host from a cluster, it does not like that. If I move and put the host in maintenance mode to fix it, and vRA is down, Zerto does not like it. Zerto should figure out that this host has an issue and it went down. Zerto should then let me upload that vRA information to another vRA.

So far, we have not seen any issue. We will know more down the road as we use it more and more, but right now, we are okay.

It is very scalable. That is why we did not go for Veeam. We went for Zerto.

Our environment is very big. I work for a large bank. 

I have not yet called their support. I did not have to call them.

We switched from VMware SRM to Zerto. VMware SRM is good, but if I do not do error-level replication and I do only vSphere replication, it is not good. The vSphere replication is not as good as the Zerto replication. Zerto is faster. It takes less time.

I did not do the implementation, but my team deployed it. Because I have used it before, my guess is that it is not complicated to deploy.

We have seen an ROI. If I do a vSphere replication from vCenter to vCenter, and of course, we can do long-distance vCenter migration these days, it would not be as good as Zerto replication.

There is a lot of confusion with Zerto licensing. They have a migration license and a replication license. They should simplify the licensing process. 

The migration license costs a lot of money, and it is only on a one-time basis. If you use that license, it ties to that VM. I might re-migrate that VM in the next five to ten years. It is another environment, but my license is stuck there. 

The replication license is fine, and I have no issue with its pricing model, but they should simplify the migration license. It should not be tied to a VM. They can reduce the price because a lot of people do not buy it because of the price. A long time ago, Double-Take Software used to do what Zerto is doing now. It is another replication software.

I was not in that group, but they did test Veeam. I also used Veeam in my last job. I am not sure if I am qualified to compare, but Veeam seems to be for a small to medium company, whereas Zerto is an enterprise software.

Overall, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten because we do not yet know everything.

Our primary use cases include replication and disaster recovery. 

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. We are really happy with RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives).

Both the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) are fine. They always meet our requirements. Their significance is not driven by a single factor but rather by the customers. Some customers require an RPO of a few hours, while others require up to 24 hours. It depends on the specific needs of the customer.

The most valuable feature for us and for my company is that we are replicating most of our production customers to the DR site, and we can do testing whenever we want. The customers are very happy with the way we do the testing while the primary is still running. There's no disturbance to the primary production site. 

The most important function right now is that we have another DR site, which is in a very old environment that is non-Zerto. We were log shipping there through another method. We are migrating over to the Zerto platform so we can replicate it to the new DR site so we can shut it down. That's going to be a lot of savings for us, shutting down the old replication with the other way. That will be one of the benefits too.

Zerto offers near-synchronous replication, which is always on and constantly replicates only the changed data to the recovery sites within seconds. It doesn't really bother us because we have enough bandwidth. Since we do a 24-hour recovery, it does not take a lot of disk space. It's an issue sometimes because I have to constantly increase the space on the disks at the DR site. On the VPG (Virtual Protection Groups), I have to constantly increase the space. That's where the alerts are being generated too.  

Someone suggested to me that I should turn off this feature, but that's not the way to do it. Turning it off temporarily is similar to applying a bandage.

Moreover, we have plans for DR recovery in the cloud. That's our next step, and it's likely to be on the agenda. We probably will use the license we have for that, which we can use as of today.

Zerto generates many false positive alerts, which is annoying. I still have thousands of alerts in my inbox, and those are false alerts. When I check there's actually no problem.

I have been using Zerto for four-plus years. 

It's very stable as far as we're running. Even though I'm running it on a very old Windows Server 2012 server, it's still running fine without any issues. 

Scalability-wise, it's pretty good, too, but we're not there yet. We are using it for small 50+ VMs we are protecting right now, but we are continuously growing. We may have to expand with multiple ZVMs (Virtual Managers). We're going to install multiple. We just have one on each side, which we don't have an issue with.

The customer service and support are really good. I wish they had phone support too right away, but we have to go through their website and open a ticket.

Moreover, there's always going to be something a person is not one hundred percent knowledgeable about. He has to escalate to the top tier. 

Positive

Somebody else did the deployment in the company and I took it over after that. I just recently upgraded to the latest version without any issues. Zerto is very easy to upgrade.

There is an area of improvement for Zerto folks. Every time we do an upgrade, if we are three or four releases behind, we have to go to the next level, then the next level, and then the latest. This is a pain. We would like the ability to skip to the newest version. 

ROI is pretty good compared to the recovery compared to the investment we have. The solution is worth it. If we go to the cloud, the ROI is definitely going to be much more.

The pricing is pretty decent. We got a good deal. 

I really like Zerto. I've been using it for many years. It's a quick recovery. I failed over the complete site to the DR many times and then failed back to the production without any issues. 

We have VMware SRM but we are not using it. We have a license, we can use it, but we're not using it because Zerto is our primary right now. 

Zerto is very easy to use. It's not dependent on the hardware. It can decouple from any hardware. You can use it, even if you have different hardware at the source and the destination. That was the biggest attraction when we got into Zerto. It's pretty decent. 

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

Currently, our use case is to create a replicated system. We have no access to the internal VMs. We can manage the VMs up to a point, but we cannot get inside to do any kind of corrective actions to the servers themselves. We had no backup solution in place, so we needed to get something there. That is what we are using it for. It is replicating out to Azure. This way we have some place in case the ones on-site get compromised or have issues.

We are moving to a new data center. There are several VMs that we have to move over there that have RDM disks or SQL clusters. Those are the hardest things to move at this point in time, but now that I have the setup and it is ready to go, all we have to do is just flip the switch and get everything over where they are supposed to be. It is going to be a lifesaver for me. It will save me a whole lot of time in putting things back together.

Its initial setup can be better. It looks easy, but if you do not have things in the right place, it is not as easy as it looks. Some of the instructions were not clear. They were a little bit confusing. For example, while setting up SSH initially, it was a little bit unclear if I needed to use a regular credential or some other credential. This was one of the things that was a little fuzzy, and we had to get somebody else involved to help us out.

I have been using Zerto for about a year.

It seems to be pretty stable provided our network stays up and the firewalls do not go down.

I have not had to scale it yet, but we are planning to replicate an environment of roughly a thousand machines.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten because it took a while for the communications back and forth to get it set up. We could not always get together at the same time. We would also run into an issue, and we had to go to development or somebody else to figure out what was going on with it. We would then wait for that response. There were a lot of issues that we had that required a lot of back and forth.

Positive

We did have SRM in place for a little while for about 75 machines. Most of the machines that were being replicated with SRM went away when we had a dissolution with another part of our facilities, so we pulled that out and stopped using it. We then went to Zerto about that same time. 

We are not using it for a full DR. We have another solution in place for doing the DR work. Zerto, at this point, is primarily for replication. 

We are also not using Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. We are using another solution for that.

It was a little rough, but it was not terrible. When we were setting this up, I was working with several machines that were 30 or 40 terabytes in size. Moving that data out to that other location was a long, slow, and ongoing process. There were several times when we had to reach out to their support to try and figure out what was going on. We had to make some adjustments to how they were configured, but that was the biggest challenge we had with that the whole time.

It is slow initially, but once you get it all up there, it is not so bad. It took days to get that data moved. Once it got up or synced, it was down to seven or eight minutes, but it took days to get everything up there to begin with. It took about a week from start to finish to have it fully deployed.

We worked with a Zerto rep. They said that this is what we need, and we got everything in place, but then as we were trying to deploy it, we had issues. We had to pull in support to help us straighten out what we were having problems with. They have been pretty good. Fortunately, I have not had to call them much. Once we got it set up, it was fairly easy to figure out, but doing that initial configuration was a little difficult.

We have not yet seen an ROI. We are going to be moving to a new environment and a new data center. I am sure I would see a big return on investment at that point.

I did not evaluate other options, but there were some higher-up managers who were involved in those conversations. They had neglected to involve the guy who was going to manage it. I heard that they evaluated Veeam, an IBM solution, and Zerto.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten only because I have not used it a lot. When we move to the new environment, I am sure I will use it a lot.

We use Zerto for server migrations between data centers during the role swap that we do. We use it from a recovery standpoint as well.

We currently do not have disaster recovery to the cloud. We go between our data centers. That is what Zerto helps us accomplish.

Zerto works very well. We have not had any faults while using it. We are a financial institution, so we have to make sure the systems we have are available with very minimal downtime.

It has helped out a lot in man-hours. It has saved us a lot of overnight work. We can literally change our production servers in a matter of minutes to hours. Rather than having to do this gradually or a couple of weeks in advance and have several teams and business partners involved, we can literally do it live on the same day.

Zerto is probably one of the faster ones in terms of recovery. You can just go into the console, and because it is always replicating over to the other side, it takes minutes.

Being able to do our recovery and being able to migrate between data centers during the role swap is valuable just because of the amount of time it takes. It takes 55 hours or so. Right now, we are doing this in a VDI environment. We are going to experiment with it as a proof of concept because we have a thousand machines that we have to move and do all the assignments. Zerto would lessen that down by a few hours, and then we can use some scripts to do everything on the Horizon's side. We have not done it yet, but we are hoping to reduce it down to about 3 hours instead of 55 hours. We will also be able to manage our host better and be in a better recovery state. If the host happens to go down, we can quickly recover.

It is very user-friendly. There is no wondering about what a feature does. It is easy to use.

If they already do not have it, they can have some APIs for the Horizon environment. Instead of having to use some scripts to get around, they can make it a lot more user-friendly for integration.

We have been using Zerto for two years.

It has been very stable. We have not had any issues while using it. When we need it to do its job, it is always dependable.

It scales very quickly. We can set up a whole new environment in an hour. We can get the server setup and all the VMs that are required for it to function in an hour or two.

I have not used their support. My peers had to use it. They seem very responsive and knowledgeable. 

The other DR tool that I have used is from Symantec. It was an old-school recovery tool. It was back in the day when it took a whole day to get things back up.

It was deployed before I joined the company.

Its price is fair. It is very cost-effective compared to the cost of the labor for your workers and associates. 

We selected Zerto over others primarily for the ability to replicate and help with our role swap. It cuts the downtime of the production systems by a large volume. This way, we can meet the deadline and not have that much client impact. In the financial side of banking, you do not want bad performance.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement, but it definitely makes your life a lot easier.

We use the product solely for disaster recovery.

The solution has helped with zero data loss from a transactional perspective. We have about forty servers in there today and they all serve a core function for our business. With Zerto, it's a matter of just being able to achieve zero data loss in minutes in terms of recovery time. That's amazing, and it really enables our business from a disaster recovery perspective.

The key benefit for us, and why we transitioned to Zerto years ago was really the recovery time. We went from hours to days on some of these applications, to minutes.

I like the granularity of the checkpoints. That's been extremely beneficial for us in testing. The near synchronous replication of Zerto is great. Knowing that it's within seconds or minutes allows us to achieve our goals from an RPO perspective. 

I like the live failovers. 

It's also a very easy-to-use product and very easy to administer from just a time perspective. 

We're able to stand up our DR site within an hour if we need to. 

We've been able to use it to do kind VM migrations from site to site in the past. Just it doing it behind the scenes allowed us to dramatically reduce any downtime for private cloud to a private cloud or even on-premise to private cloud migrations.

When handling migrations, it's fairly intuitive. There's a progress bar with percentages. Sometimes the timing fluctuates based on bandwidth. However, it's going completely in the background. It doesn't interfere with anything. When you are live, you can cut over with minimal downtime.

It's improved our RTOs. It's dramatically improved RTOs compared to what we had before.

We've had multiple unplanned failovers and the solution worked as expected. It's probably saved us 24 hours per instance.

The product has reduced the amount of staff involved in data recovery situations. Before the solution, we had two or three different mechanisms for different types of systems in different applications. Now it's just one click, one interface, and one administrator. 

When we do failover and failback, it doesn't maintain some of the settings that it should and I don't really understand why that happens. Quite regularly, anytime we do a failover or a fallback, we have to confirm all the settings for each VM. That takes a little bit of time. There is some power shell for that, so we've been able to automate that or at least optimize that. That said, that's my only complaint. Maybe that's a VMware limitation. I'm not sure.

We've been a customer of Zerto for several years. We started using it around 2017 or 2018.

The stability is good. Of course, from a maintenance perspective, sometimes with the failover, we have to re-sync or set up the settings again for whatever reason. I'm not sure if that is a limitation of the product or a limitation of VMware. 

We have six or seven users that use the solution, and typically just two or three administrators. 

We've scaled in that we have increased our VM count or VPG count. However, if we had thousands of VMs, I'd question the RTO or RPO capabilities at that point. However, ours is fairly small, under 40 VMs, and it has worked well for us. 

Technical support has been great. In our last DR failover, we needed to put in an urgent ticket and we got a very prompt response on that. Based on my interactions with them, by far they have the best support. 

Positive

We did use other solutions before, however, they were not as comprehensive as Zerto. We moved to Zerto so we could get our RTO and RPO down to minutes. Just being able to do everything with one administrator makes it much easier than before since we were doing some things from backups.

From a desk disaster recovery perspective, Zerto has replaced all legacy backups. From an administration and time perspective, we're definitely seeing some savings there. 

The initial deployment was not very straightforward. We were able to deploy in a matter of hours. The foundational aspects of Zerto are pretty easy, however, managing VRAs and getting the replication going can be a bit more work.

For the initial deployment, we only needed a single administrator. 

The solution definitely requires maintenance, just to keep everything up to date. However, it's very intuitive and everything happens very quickly, based on how many VRAs you have. We have three administrators capable of managing Zerto as needed. 

We have three sites, either on private cloud or on-premises. They are all VMware-based. 

Initially, a consultant assisted us with the base installation.

We have not calculated the ROI of the solution.

I was a little disappointed this year with the pricing, especially being a legacy customer of Zerto. 

They changed the licensing structure as a result of the HP acquisition. We had a significant increase that was not very well communicated to us and wasn't planned for us and it hit us pretty hard. From a budgeting standpoint, we only got notified a couple of months before, however, we were already in our calendar year. We couldn't plan for it properly due to the timing. It was frustrating for us. The costs were up significantly for us this year. That is definitely something we will be mindful of and keep an eye on going forward. We may need to find an alternative if the costs keep increasing.

We did explore other solutions, such as VMware and other competitors. However, the ease of use and ease of implementation were good selling points and became a key deciding factor for us. 

We have not used the immutable data copies as of yet.

In terms of dealing with threats or attacks, I've read a lot of the white papers, however, we haven't really had to have a need or a use case for that at this point. We're aware of that functionality, however, we haven't had a need to really utilize that, thankfully.

It took us a while to realize the benefits of the product. The initial phase for us was to cover about twenty different servers, which had interdependencies within the application. It was quite difficult. It took us about a year and a half to fully utilize our application or our initial phase of productivity. That said, that wasn't a Zerto limitation. That was the fact that we were changing IP addresses between our sites, so it was more of an application configuration delay. Zerto was ready to go on day one, basically.

We don't use Zerto to support disaster recovery on AWS. We're strictly on-premises hypervisors. We use virtual machines.

We haven't used Zerto's data recovery testing functionality. 

I'd advise new users to utilize the failover testing. You really have to make sure the application functions. Within our use case, for example, we have very interdependent applications. Each piece requires lots of communication, lots of databases, lots of other application transactions that are interdependent, and lots of integrations within our application. Utilizing the failover testing was critical for us.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.