HPE Zerto Software Reviews

The primary use case is to migrate VMs. It's easier to use than HCX and SRM.

Zerto made our migration from different data centers very easy and very smooth. Zerto support and our account manager have always been there to help us out.

I found the very easy VPG setup, the easy recovery, and failover testing to be the most valuable features.

It's very user-friendly. You only need a couple of clicks, and it gets the job done. We also have SRM, but Zerto just requires a couple of clicks. You can test with Zerto, and you don't have to commit. So in terms of ease of use, Zerto is better. That's why we use it for migration.

In terms of reducing downtime, we don't actually have any because of seeding and mirroring. However, on the failover, it only takes two seconds of a blip.

Zerto's speed of recovery compared to that of others is great. It's incomparable, and the ease of use is always there.

Even though Zerto is for disaster recovery, it would be nice if it can also make backups.

I've been working with Zerto for three to four years.

It's very stable. They have bug fixes. If there's a problem, you can report it, and they immediately provide a solution.

Zerto's scalability is amazing. If they could do backups in the future, it would be better.

We're in a healthcare environment, so we have probably 30,000 VMs. We only have a couple of licenses, but that's probably going to grow in the near future. We're going to be using it in the cloud as well.

I would give technical support a nine out of ten. I'm taking away a point because, at times, they send emails for me to read when I need something done immediately.

We previously used SRM. We use Zerto because it is just easy to use. You don't need to set up a lot of stuff. You only need to set up one appliance on each site, and you're good to go.

The initial deployment is very straightforward. You just install the appliance, make sure that all the ports are working fine, test the connection, and you're done. If you have any problems, technical support is always there to help.

We had help from CDI for the initial deployment, and they were not bad. It was easy enough, but we had to use our credits. If it were not for the credits, we could have done it ourselves.

After the initial deployment, my team has been doing all the upgrades and any other setups.

We're down to a couple of data centers now, and our data center cost is going down. That is the ROI we have seen with Zerto.

The pricing is fair.

We evaluated SRM.

You don't have to evaluate Zerto; it just works. I would give it a ten out of ten;
I have no complaints.

We use it for our conversion from Hyper-V to VMware. The DR purposes are being looked into as well.

We've got about 1500 to 2000 Hyper-V machines. These Hyper-V machines are used and converted to VMware, and these are the two environments that we work with now, both on-premises and in a hosted environment.

The ease of the conversion, moving from Hyper-V over to VMware, has been the most valuable feature. It's the primary reason why we chose Zerto.

We've seen a massive benefit from using Zerto in terms of time savings and consistency. You see a consistent outcome every time you do the conversions. We're moving from one platform to another, but the payloads in what we're moving are different. We see consistent delivery.

Time savings-wise, I see anywhere from 30 to 50 VMs be converted from Hyper-V to VMware on a nightly basis. We've seen some pretty good throughput on the nights that we do conversions.

Zerto has absolutely helped to reduce downtime. If we were to do this manually, the amount of time that we would have to shut down the VMs on Hyper-V to be able to do the conversions and move them over to VMware would be massive.

That amount of downtime would cost our company a lot. We've got a team of three or four guys that do the labor. If you take what they're getting paid and you compound the amount of time that it would take to do the conversion, there would be a drastic cost in labor for those conversions.

Right now, our production environment runs on-premises, and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. However, our development runs on that hardware. In the case of a DR event, we would need to shut down development and bring up our secondary copy of production. We're hoping that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that.

Zerto is primarily being used this year.

We're getting consistent results, so the product seems to be very stable.

From a DR perspective, we use multiple different facets. We have multi-site data centers in our environment, along with Cohesity. We use Cohesity from a backup and DR perspective.

I was not involved in the initial setup but have heard feedback that those involved loved the simplicity of it.

We've absolutely seen an ROI in terms of time savings with respect to downtime. When you convert a couple of thousand machines from one platform to another, the amount of downtime that it would take itself would have paid for Zerto many times over.

We get our money's worth with Zerto.

If you're in the middle of a conversion between different platforms, regardless of whether you're moving from on-premises to hosted or from one environment to another, it seems to be very agile and able to move your workloads into different environments pretty easily. I would give Zerto a rating of nine out of ten.

Its primary use case is for disaster recovery of 10 servers that we have in-house.

The testing of failover and failback is critical to any company, especially if they're certified in some platform like we are with ISO 27001. It is a necessity, and one of the main reasons I purchased Zerto.

Live replication and up to the second type of failover are valuable. The fact that we can do test failovers and failbacks is important for our ISO certification.

More user support would be best for me because I'm not in the product all the time. So, having strong support is probably the most important decision on any products that we buy.

The price is another thing that they definitely need to work on unless it has changed. I purchased mine a while back. 

When it is up and running, it is just always running, but because we're changing our infrastructure, basically, everything has to be destroyed and rebuilt.

I know it is scalable with the backup solution. I don't understand why that wasn't there early on, but it is neat that they've added that functionality in there.

It has been a long time since I've worked with them. So, I would rate them a 7 out of 10.

It is rare that I have to contact them. We are in the process of redoing our VMware infrastructure. We have to reinstall the whole product, which we haven't done for a long time. So, I'm not that familiar, and we're probably going to have to pay for services where I would like that to be handled by support to help us.

Neutral

It has been quite a while, but we used to use Double-Take to replicate some servers between offices. Zerto is much better at doing that functionality, and that's why we switched. 

The ease of use is definitely better with Zerto. The data recovery with Zerto is very fast. You just push buttons for recovery and flip back.

The initial setup was straightforward, but I had a team, probably from Zerto and not the consultant, that helped us with the installation. So, I had somebody right there holding my hand, and it was very easy to do.

That's hard to say because we haven't had a catastrophe. If we have a failure, hands down, I can't complain about that, but we haven't had any incidents.

Even though there is a fast speed of recovery and ease of use, I haven't measured the time savings and resource savings with Zerto. That's analytics, and we're not that detailed. We're user support focused.

It is very expensive. It is overpriced. No doubt. What held us up for many years from committing to buying it was always the cost. That's also why we only have 10 licenses.

We probably looked at other solutions, but I don't recall what they were at this time.

I know that they have a backup now, which they didn't have when I purchased originally, but we don't use that today. It may be something we'll look into. 

The solution is great. I'd rate it a 10 out of 10.

We have customers who come in for DR as a service, but we also do inter-cloud DR.

It has brought customers into our cloud, since this was a barrier to get in. We have used the migration model a lot to bring customers in. We just brought in a customer from Microsoft Hyper-V into our VMware file. That would have been a difficult challenge if we did not have Zerto as a tool.

Zerto has helped to reduce downtime with several customers. For example, we had a customer who had many of their VMs encrypted. They had about 40 to 60 terabytes worth of data. To recover that from backup would have taken days. We were able to bring them up at the DR site, getting them up and running, within hours. This would have cost the customer millions if they had been down. As a title company, if they would have been down, that would have disrupted a whole title industry, where people are trying to buy houses. If you can't get the title for the house, then you can't move forward. Other people wouldn't have been able to sell their house. There would have been a ripple effect. So, that was huge.

It has definitely helped our customers reduce their DR testing. We can do failover tests live in the middle of the day and generate a report, and they are comfortable with it. 

Journaling is by far the most valuable feature. We have used it several times for customers who have gotten ransomware and had to do a rollback. Having the right time period was important. Some of them had their backups encrypted. So, they didn't encrypt the Zerto machine seven days previously, and we were able to bring that back up.

I have been using Zerto for about seven years.

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. All the workloads go on hosts. So, in order to grow, you will need to have more hosts anyway.

From the relationship standpoint, we have never had a local rep in South Bend, Indiana. It has always been somebody in Boston, and there is not a lot of communication. That is one of the big things. We would like help driving the business and talking to our sales people as well as more involvement from them. We could really utilize it more, drawing more customers in, but we need help with that.

I would rate the technical support as seven out of 10. Where it becomes difficult is if Tier 1 can't help you, then it takes a long time to get to Tier 2 or the development side, if something is beyond their capabilities.

Neutral

We use VMware High Availability, which is one of the options in our cloud. It is a less expensive option. So, we have customers who want that. Also, we have tried Veeam Backup & Replication, which is not cloud-native, so we don't use that. However, a company, whom we acquired, was using it. So, we tried it out.

Zerto is a lot easier to use. It has a lot more features, as far as orchestration, than VMware High Availability. The reallocation of IPs and the networking part of it are not that great in VMware High Availability. Plus, the retention that you get with Zerto is better than High Availability. Veeam didn't get into that much, and there is no orchestration into the cloud. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. The wizard that you run through is just very straightforward. If it is a DR-as-a-service customer on my end, then I am just deploying it as sort of a cloud connect, which is very easy.

I deploy it for all our customers.

We have absolutely seen ROI. Over time, we make money off of the CPU, RAM, and storage of Zerto usage. We benefit that way.

In a world where others are catching up, e.g., VMware High Availability, there needs to be a less expensive option as well. When a customer has approximately 100 VMs, if you multiply by 40, we aren't charging a very high margin on it at all since the license is so expensive. We feel their pain. That is the most expensive part of it. The storage, CPU, and RAM are a lot less. It is the licensing that is really expensive. Whereas, with an option like VMware High Availability, it is a couple dollars per month. That is our spend that we are charged by VMware, then our margin is higher on those VMs. Giving us some ability to have higher margins, as an MSP, would be a good thing.

I would rate Zerto as nine out of 10.

We are replicating all of our production VMs to a DR site. We also have another offsite vCenter that we are replicating to a DR site for protection and eventual testing.

It makes me feel more comfortable that we have something to fall back on in case of a disaster. We are a large insurance company, so we have a lot of different applications and SQL Servers. We never had a disaster recovery site before, so this will protect us in the event of a disaster.

A good, valuable feature is using the preseeded LUNs, when deleting a virtual machine. Then, I put the VPG back to keep track of where I was at, so I don't have to replicate everything. Instead, I just preseeded LUNs since it needs less replication time.

It is fairly intuitive and easy to use.

You can go back fairly quickly. You push the button and there you are.

I need to get up to the latest version so I can move my journals to a particular LUN, saving them with a particular storage altogether, rather than with the virtual machine. This is not available until I upgrade, and I need to upgrade all my hypervisors. This would be something that would be nice to have if it could be used on older versions.

I have been using Zerto for almost three years.

It has been stable. We have had glitches between our site and DR site. When the MPLS comes back up, Zerto just kicks right back off, doing what it needs to do.

As we have been growing more VMs in production, I have still been adding to Zerto. So, I haven't had any problems with the amount of VMs and everything that Zerto can handle.

I haven't really had any problems with support. Most of the time, when calling support, I find the answer before they call me back. Or, they will send me an email, and say, "Here, try this."

I would rate the technical support as nine or 10 (out of 10).

Positive

We didn't previously use another solution.

It provides us with a safety net.

We evaluated RecoverPoint, which was very difficult to set up. Even as a test, it was hard to set up. With Zerto, all you have to do is deploy the executable and start setting things up. So, it was very easy. Then, I insisted that the company buy Zerto for me.

RecoverPoint was difficult to set up and use. It wasn't as menu-driven as Zerto. 

We really haven't done any recovery or rollbacks. We are getting there. Later this year, we will be doing those types of failover tests, rollback tests, etc.

We haven't done DR testing. That will probably be done in the next three months.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10.

Our use cases are disaster recovery and long-term retention against ransomware.

Zerto was part of our technology transformation initiative about five years ago, not only to protect our customers' intellectual property that we create for them, but also to protect our organization as a whole.

In a way, it has reduced the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation since we are contracted with insurance companies to help us recover. This solution allows us to be more self-sufficient, using our existing staff to recover.

Zerto has helped reduce our organization's DR testing to seconds to minutes. We have been able to save probably close to 200 hours a year.

If something happens, and we are out and about, I would like to be able to interface with it on our mobile phones. That would be great.

I have been using it for about five years.

Their technical support is really good. They do quarterly tests to make sure everything is working and spot on. Our Zerto engineer is local, so we work with him quite often just to make sure everything is working.

I would rate the technical support as 11 out of 10.

Positive

It replaced Veeam. Zerto is a lot easier.

Prior to Zerto, when we were looking at our traditional disaster recovery, we were looking at 30 days plus.

We have been able to reduce our RPO and RTO to a matter of seconds to minutes versus what our technology committee established as our metrics, which was 30 minutes versus a few days.

Knock on wood, we have never had downtime. However, it has given us better peace of mind.

I would rate Zerto as 11 out of 10.

We work in a public safety environment and we use Zerto for disaster recovery.

It allowed us to migrate very quickly from our old environment to the new environment that we're building out. We were able to move the entire environment over to our new VMware 7 environment within a matter of hours.

Because we work in a public safety environment, we can't have downtime. We've had a couple of situations where we had to do some firmware upgrades. We would fail over to the DR site and Zerto helped us get back up really quickly. It was fast.

We set it up strictly for DR so that we can fail over and do a test failover without causing any problems.

And from the standpoint of ease of use, Zerto is a third faster for recovery compared to other solutions.

The ease of use is one of the best features. Previously, we were using Site Replication Manager with VMware and it was a little bit cumbersome. With Zerto, we liked the fact that it was hardware-agnostic and we were able to spin it up pretty quickly and get it working.

We had a situation where we had to relicense VMs once they were moved over. We later found out that that feature is built-in, but it's not easy to find. The way it's done is that you have to go to the target site to turn it on. If that were explained a little bit better up front, that would be helpful.

I have been using Zerto for four or five years.

It seems to be very stable. We haven't had any problems.

My counterpart is the person who takes care of this side of things, but from what I've heard, he's had really good luck with their tech support.

We used VMware's SRM. That old solution was a little bit cumbersome and Zerto seemed to be easier to use. It was more straightforward. It was much quicker to set up and the day-to-day use is easier.

I was involved on the VMware side, getting things ready for Zerto. My counterpart was the one who actually implemented Zerto. I believe the Zerto implementation was pretty straightforward. The only complexity involved was learning how it worked.

Our primary use cases were designed around backing up and being able to restore our management plan. This isn't something used for our department users. It is specifically for our infrastructure, things like vCenter, vRealize Operations—all those things that we still have to maintain. We wanted something a little more granular than just a standard backup. We needed to be able to say, "Rollback half an hour or an hour," as opposed to following the backup schedule that the larger backup system provided.

We're using it for migration. Zerto plays a large role in helping us move away from Hyper-V into VMware. We're talking about multiple departments that had to transition their applications and Zerto gave us an opportunity to do it in a much less painful way.

Another key benefit is that our response time has significantly decreased. We're no longer having to rely on the traditional process where you manually execute a backup and hope to God it works okay. And then, you have to run through whatever changes are necessary and cross your fingers that, if you have to restore, it will come back. We don't have that problem with Zerto.

The solution has also helped to reduce downtime for us, absolutely. In most cases, we are able to use Zerto as a momentary backup, run an upgrade or installation, and see whether or not we're going to succeed. We can potentially back it out without anybody knowing about it because it's still within our maintenance window. We never exceed that rather limited time period. That's very helpful. With our existing backup, more likely than not we're rolling into days at a time if something fails. So if our maintenance window was on the weekend, it would roll into the production week and cut into the week by a few days. That would be very problematic.

And the recovery speed is basically as fast as the speed of our pipe, and that's what makes it great. As long as our pipes are fast, we don't have to worry. We can roll in, roll out, or potentially roll back if we have to, within a really small window of time.

In addition, it has definitely reduced the number of operational groups involved in backups. Zerto is not managed by our storage team. It is managed by the team I'm on, which is infrastructure. Because of that, it's all internal to us on the infrastructure team. We don't have to go outside of our team to coordinate with others.

There are several valuable features because of the way we use it. The backup and restore features are definitely indispensable.

There are certain things about the user interface that could be a little bit more user-friendly. But it really depends on the audience. If we are using it as a technical tool, our team is the audience and we are able to utilize it. But if we were to pass this on to, let's say, the department users, that would become a little problematic. I'm wondering whether or not we can actually expand our offering to those department users. That may be a question.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

As long as our infrastructure is stable, it's stable.

All I have to do is add managers out there and it expands. What it boils down to is that my infrastructure has to be able to support it. I have to have space where I can send the backups to. As long as that exists, we're fine.

The customer support is pretty good. The bottom line is that the customer service is responsive, whether we're talking about technical challenges or even licensing challenges. They've been very helpful in both ways.

Positive

We played a little bit with Veeam, but for the most part, we relied on our storage team to provide us with backups. We switched to Zerto because that team wasn't able to deliver in a timely fashion and they weren't able to guarantee restorability.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. We have an individual who is our infrastructure expert. He took it upon himself to try it out. He told us what he found out when he did that trial and we started playing with it a little bit more and saw how easy it was to use.

I don't want to create upward pressure on their pricing plan, but the pricing is good. It's affordable.

The amount we had to set aside for our existing backup solution, compared to Zerto, was astronomical. The way Zerto works, it is so easy to scale up and out. It's not going to end up creating undue pushback as far as the cost goes.

We evaluated other solutions, with Veeam being one of them.

There's a lot about Veeam that we only just touched the tip of. I can't say with a lot of certainty what specific features Veeam may have. But there's a reason that we only touched the tip of Veeam and jumped over to Zerto.

One of the things that brought us to Zerto was talking to some of the folks that were here, at VMware Explore, years back, about what Zerto did, how it did it, and where it got its origins. That told us it was something that was definitely pretty solid and worth trying. I have to admit that, after trying it, it hasn't disappointed.

Leaving Veeam aside and comparing Zerto with our existing backup functionality, forget it. The two solutions are night and day. There is no comparison whatsoever. There is a lot of overhead with our existing backup feature that we just don't have with Zerto. We definitely have an easier time managing and controlling it. Zerto is definitely easier to use than our existing backup function.

One of the things that I'm finding with Zerto is that we're discovering new uses every day. As we continue to explore what Zerto can do, we haven't even gotten to the point where we say, "We wish it could do X." I'm not quite sure how Zerto interacts with cloud as a target, right now. That's something I need to learn. That's not necessarily a fault of Zerto, it's just me not knowing it yet.