HPE Zerto Software Reviews

Our use case is 100 percent disaster recovery between two different geographies. We have a very large private cloud offering. We've got about 1,200 customers and almost 10,000 VMs that are under Zerto protection. Every one of those virtual machines needs to be replicated from Waltham to Chicago, from the East Coast of the U.S. to the central U.S. Likewise, we have a European business with the exact same flow, although it's much smaller as far as number of VMs; it might be a couple of hundred. That implementation is going from Berlin to Amsterdam. We've got one-way protection in two different geographies and all of those machines are under Zerto protection.

The number-one benefit is that for the first time we could show, at a customer-level of granularity, how a customer was protected, and what their RPO was in, real time. Each one of our 1,200 or so customers has a portion of those 10,000 VMs. For the first time we were able to tell a product leader or product manager what the RPO was on Thursday at 2:00 PM for that customer. We could say, "Hey, it was 67 seconds." Our company is very customer-centric and customer-focused. There's less interest in what the overall health is, and a lot of times there's specific interest in, "Hey, how is that customer doing?" either for performance or for RPO time.

Zerto also allowed us to easily pick groups of virtual machines, group them as a whole, and have that be segregated from the storage layer. That is the storage-agnostic benefit from their product. That agnostic feature with respect to the storage layer allowed us to group VMs by customer and not only report on RPO by customer, but also to more easily sell different RPO plans. We were able to prioritize and say, "Okay, these 10 customers have platinum and these 500 have silver."

Four years ago when we did a PoC between two other vendors and Zerto, there were two features of Zerto that sold it, hands-down. One was the ease of creating protection groups, the ease with which our engineers could create protection, add virtual machines into the Zerto product, and get them under DR protection. The other products we were looking at required work from two different teams. The storage team had to get involved. With this product, the whole thing could be done by just our virtualization team, and that was a big sell for us.

The second feature that sold us was the sub-second RPO. One of the things that made Zerto's product stand out from some of the more traditional solutions four years ago was its ability to maintain sub-second RPO over a group of machines, and that group of machines could be spread over multiple storage hardware. It was the storage-agnostic features of the product.

The number-one area in which they need to improve their product is what I would call "automatic self-healing." This is related to running them at scale. If you're a small company with 50 VMs, this doesn't really become a problem for you. You don't have 1,000 blades and 1,000 of their VRAs running that you need to keep healthy. But once you get over a certain scale, it becomes a full-time job for someone to keep their products humming. We have 1,000 VRAs and if any one of their VRAs has a problem, goes offline, all of the customer protection groups and all of the customers that are tied to that VRA are not replicating at all. That means the RPO is slipping until somebody makes a manual effort to fix the issue. It has become a full-time job at my company for somebody to keep Zerto running all the time, everywhere, and to keep all the customers up and going. 

They desperately need to work self-healing into the core product. If a VRA has a problem, the product needs to be able to take some sort of measure to self-heal from that; to reassign protection. Right now it doesn't do anything in that self-healing area.

My company implemented Zerto in 2016, so we've been live with their product for a little over four years.

The stability comes back to size and scale. It depends. If you are not replicating heavy workloads—meaning you don't have a SQL server that's doing thousands and thousands of IOPS, and you don't have multiple SQL Servers on the same very large hardware blade—Zerto is incredibly stable, based on my experience with the product. 

However, we are doing that. There's a one-to-one relationship between the Zerto VRA, which is essentially their chunk of code that does the replication, and a physical server. The physical server is running anywhere from one to as many virtual servers as someone can fit onto it. And that one VRA has to manage and push all the change blocks for all the workloads running on it. So if you've got five or six really heavy workloads running, that one VRA that has to handle all of that and push it to your destination can, and does, crash. VRAs in that situation crash or become unstable. We've worked a lot with Zerto over the last two years on tweaking the VRAs with advanced settings. We've directly been involved with identifying a couple of bugs with the VRAs. When the VRAs are pushed, they can only be pushed so far and then they crash.

It does perform. However, we have VRAs that crash all the time. When we go back and we look at why they crashed it's because we're pushing them too hard. We're doing things that they would say we shouldn't be doing. They would say, "Don't set six SQL Servers on the same blade. That's too much. Don't do that."

Zerto has worked with us very effectively on identifying advanced settings that we can make to the VRAs to make them perform better, and to be more stable in the "abusive" environment that we throw at their code base.

It could be more stable for really heavy use cases like that. But Zerto would come back and say, "Well, our best practices would have you put some sort of anti-affinity rule in place so that you don't end up with that many heavy I/O machines on a single blade." They would say that doing so is not best practice; don't do it. You could say that we abused their product, in that sense. 

But it works. If you align with best practices, it's pretty stable.

We have no concerns about the scalability, although I should qualify that statement. Zerto can scale horizontally extremely well. They've got one VRA per blade and that one VRA is their data plane. You can scale out your environment horizontally with as many blades or servers as you want, which is how people do virtualization and Zerto will scale with you. We've never hit a limit as far as its ability to scale as horizontally.

The caveat would be, as I mentioned elsewhere, the size of the pipe in your infrastructure to handle all of that replication. But that doesn't tie to the Zerto product itself. 

In terms of the issue of VRAs crashing, you want to scale horizontally rather than scale vertically, because if you scale vertically you're packing more and more virtual machines into the same number of physical servers. You're stacking them up high rather than across. If you stack them up high you have concerns about the scalability of the single VRA. The VRAs do get overloaded. Don't pack them too high. Scale out, not up.

Zerto has spread out as a company. They've mushroomed out into other areas. They've started to develop a presence in backup and they've started to develop a larger presence in reporting. Their core product, however, is known as ZVR—Zerto Virtual Replication. We've implemented that core product 100 percent. There's no other way we could be consuming it differently or more effectively.

The newer stuff they've come out with—certainly the backup—we don't touch that at all. The backup product is not ready for prime time. It might be good for a small customer that may have 50 machines they want to back up. But for our use case, with SOC compliance, and having to report on the success of backups for recovery, and although we looked very closely at their backup and where they were going with it, it's not ready for us.

They're starting to go into Docker containers. None of our product right now is containerized.

A third area is analytics and reporting. The analytics and reporting would be the one new area that they've put focus on that we could be using more and getting more value out of. They've got a SaaS solution now for reporting called Zerto Analytics. We do use it. You turn on their core product and you tell it to send your reports to their SaaS offering. We've done that and we can consume the analytics product, but we just haven't really operationalized it yet. That, for us, has been a tool looking for a problem.

It took us about two months to deploy the solution, but that was because we're a very conservative company. We purposely went extremely slowly. If we had wanted to go faster, it could have been done probably in a week or two, to get all 6,000 VMs under protection.

When we deployed it, there were two dedicated people at our company who were involved, paired up with three people from a Professional Services team from Zerto. As a tertiary, we had a full-time person from our VAR, the reseller that sold us the licensing for Zerto. With that help from Zerto and the value added reseller, it only took two of us to install it to about 600 blades and probably 5,000 virtual machines.

Our experience was excellent. Both teams were great. It was a very painless rollout.

I'm less involved with the pricing and licensing area now. The last time I was involved was a couple of years ago. In my opinion, their model is somewhat inflexible, especially for their backup product.

One of the reasons why we didn't pursue looking further at their backup product was, simply, licensing. Today we have to buy a Zerto license for every virtual machine that we want protected by their product. We have a lot of virtual machines that aren't production and that don't need to be protected by their product. They don't need sub-second RPOs. They do, however, need to be backed up. But Zerto's licensing model two years ago was, "Well, we don't care that you just need to back up those VMs, and you don't really need to replicate them. It's the same price."

We would have had to double our licensing costs for Zerto to adopt it as a backup solution. It was just not even within the realm of possibility financially. It made no financial sense for us to move off our current backup vendor. Their inability to diverge in any way from that was rigid.

Their licensing could be less rigid and more open to specific companies' use cases.

The other two vendors we evaluated back were Site Recovery Manager by VMware, and whatever Veeam's product was at the time. We also looked at CommVault lightly, but they were never considered seriously.

Zerto can do what it says it can do. It can absolutely provide sub-second recovery point objectives, but with a couple of caveats. The caveats tend to apply to large companies like mine, and by "large" I mean if you have over 2,000 to 3,000 virtual machines, versus a small to medium-sized company that maybe has 50 to 500. Once you cross that barrier, you're getting into a larger environment that you're trying to replicate with Zerto.

A couple things can break down. Zerto's product doesn't control the path between your source production data and the destination you're trying to send it to. There can be tons of bottlenecks on that path; you can be going around the world. If the bottleneck doesn't exist there, their product can absolutely do what it says it does. It's up to the customer. The people using Zerto have to understand that they own the bottlenecks in their environment. If there is a bottleneck between production and the targeted DR, the RPOs are going to slip. You're going to go from sub-seconds to minutes or hours. That's not necessarily a fault of Zerto's product. It's the fault of the design of the customer's environment and what they brought it into.

That doesn't just exist for the pipe between the two sites. On the destination side, the side that's receiving this data, the storage layer underneath needs to be more performant than the production side. That's somewhat of a strange concept for a lot of customers and people coming into the Zerto solution. They see the marketing side of, "10 seconds to RPO" and say, "Yeah, I want that." But what it means is that you've really got to look at your hardware and you've got to have class-A hardware the whole way through that Zerto pipeline, for their product to do what it says it does. Zerto makes that very clear. They don't recommend hardware; they're not in the business of supporting other vendors. But they have a published list of best practices. The best practices clearly say everything that I just said. They also have best practices around managing your workload I/O on the source side, so that you don't overwhelm their product.

But not everyone follows best practices. Certainly, when we implemented it we said, "Yeah, we get that. We understand what you're telling us. We understand that's a best practice, but we're not going to do it anyway, because it's too expensive," or we didn't have it in budget for that year. So we knew it  and we went in without following them. A couple of years later, when we got to a tipping point, we realized, "Okay, we need to go back and align with some of those best practices," things we didn't think that we had the time to align with back in 2016. We've made that journey painfully with their product, but they were very upfront with us on what the requirements for their product would be.

Overall, I would rate Zerto as a solid eight out of 10 for the core disaster recovery offering.

We've been using Zerto for data center migration, but we will begin using it for disaster recovery. Because of some data center issues, we're still using version 9.5. One of our data centers is at 6.5 and the other one is at 7, so we can't move any or upgrade to 10.

Zerto enables us to set the IPs and map everything out in our environment prior to migration. We can create VPGs and mass migrate applications, databases, and web clients. That was the selling point for us. The product is easy to use. We had a 30-minute onboarding process from our sales engineer, who showed us how to use it. 

We don't use near-synchronous replication yet. It will be essential when we start using Zerto for DR, but it isn't a big deal during our current migration. Once we have a DR site, it will be essential to have those time slots we can restore to in the event of malware and ransomware. 

Right now, if you have an error, it creates a link that takes you to a website to review information about the problem. It would be nice if Zerto could give you information within the app instead of referring you to a web application.

Zerto for two years.

Zerto is intuitive. We could set everything up in the environment within a day and a half and start migrating on the third day.

I rate Zerto 10 out of 10. 

Our primary use case currently is for replicating virtual machines on a production site and for backups. We also use it for onsite cloning, and we have a license that enables us to do that.

We don't use Zerto in the cloud at the moment. 

The tool gave us a better way to respond to any problems on the production side and improved how we can recover. The recovery capability is the best part of Zerto.

The solution reduced our recovery time objective (RTO) and improved performance on the IO by around 10%. When we implement failovers and synchronization to VMs with databases, we see a marked increase in performance.         

The solution helped reduce our downtime. Before we implemented Zerto, my organization did a recovery that took four hours. Since implementing, the last time we did a recovery, it took one hour, so the solution makes recovery significantly faster. The cost of three hours of downtime to my company would be very high.   

The way we can use checkpoints from each VM to restore them is an excellent feature, and the replication is great.

Zerto is easy to use, and it saved us five times in three years; on those occasions, we had problems with our VMs, and we used the product to roll back to a functional state or for failover, which resolved our issues. 

Regarding near-synchronous replication, Zerto is the best application we have right now. We could get another solution to do the same job, but from a design point of view, Zerto is an excellent tool for replication and synchronization, and we don't have a problem with it.

The IT could be better; we have sectioned areas and databases for iOS, Windows, and Linux. Because the solution is centralized, each computer has the VMs from every section running.

The solution is very expensive. 

I've been using Zerto for three years. 

Zerto is highly stable, and I rate it ten out of ten for stability. 

We didn't have to scale the solution, so I can't speak to the scalability. 

I give the technical support full marks; it's simple to open a case and get a quick response from the support staff. We rarely experience issues requiring us to contact support as it is.

Positive

We didn't previously use another solution of this kind. 

The initial setup was straightforward; it wasn't complex at all. It was very simple to install and set up the replication, more so than other solutions. 

The replication functionality is very user-friendly, so that was the easiest part. At the same time, the security aspect of the solution, integrating with our firewalls etc., was the most challenging element of the deployment.

We carried out the implementation via an in-house team. 

The cost is one of the only drawbacks of Zerto because it's very high, and the overall impact of the solution on our organization is relatively low. This is why we are trying to figure out if another product could fulfill the same role for cheaper.

We are currently evaluating Veeam, and how that would fit into our system, as many of our clients use it, so we wonder if it may be a better option for us.

I rate the solution ten out of ten. 

My advice to potential customers is to carefully determine the requirements for such a solution and how Zerto fulfills those. Some solutions do the same job for cheaper, so considering the price has to factor into the cost-benefit analysis.

We use it primarily for DR.

What I appreciate the most about Zerto is that it is the easiest to install, upgrade, and manage. Most things in the product are fairly intuitive and easy, including upgrades. You don't have to dig through a bunch of manuals or go through a bunch of technical data to make it work.

The low RPO times of about four to eight seconds are very nice and very valuable to us.

The alerting could be fine-tuned and improved. It does a lot of alerts, but it's a little bit cumbersome to modify them.

It could be cheaper as well.

I've been using it for six years.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any real problems or downtime. The only thing is that it runs on Windows, so that has its own problems.

Zerto's scalability is very good. We haven't had any scaling problems. We tested out DR in Azure, DR to VMware on GCP, and DR on AWS. It performed on all of those. The AWS setup was the most complicated, but AWS with Windows is a little bit messy.

We currently have 400 licenses. We have two ML350s, and we use Zerto to keep them replicated. If one fails, we just move to the other. That has been expanding, and that's where we've been adding licenses.

Zerto's technical support is very responsive. We had some posts that were not working properly and caused some issues with Zerto. The technical support staff were very helpful and worked through the night to help us resolve that. They always solved any problem I've had, so I'll give them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used SRM. It had a lot of specialized plugins and specialized machines, but was very cumbersome. We weren't guaranteed that it would work all the time. It was very complicated to set up and manage as well.

SRM was storage-vendor-dependent because you had to have plugins through the storage vendors. It wasn't IP-based at the time and relied on storage-based replication. We had disparate storage arrays and disparate systems, and the IP-based replication treasury was much more resilient on our end.

The initial setup was unbelievably easy. We had Zerto up and running in five minutes, whereas setting up the SRM replication took weeks and needed technical support staff.

We deployed it ourselves.

In terms of ROI, it was quite expensive, but I think we got a lot of value out of it, such as being able to have a reliable DR method, particularly offsite. We have very poor latency locations, and sometimes, we replicate those. Zerto makes that very easy.

From a customer perspective, the price is okay. From an investor's perspective, however, it is a little bit high.

We looked at Veeam, but Zerto was a better match for our needs.

I would advise you to give Zerto a try in your environment. Get a trial license and see how it works. I think you'll be very impressed.

Overall, I've been very happy with Zerto, and I'd give it a rating of nine on a scale from one to ten.

We use Zerto to replicate to a cloud center.

Zerto saved us a lot of money compared to the cost of replicating at the LUN level. It also really simplified it and gave us shorter RTOs and RPOs.

We got hit with ransomware about three years ago, so we had to do a full recovery with Zerto. The recovery is the best feature.

When you compare the ease of use of Zerto versus that of SAN, Zerto is a lot easier because you can do it at the actual virtual machine level versus doing the whole LUN. In the latter case, in the event of a recovery, you would have to recover the whole LUN and see what's in there. It is a lot easier to do any operation with Zerto.

We were hit with ransomware about three years ago, and the amount of time that it took us to recover from that with Zerto was weeks less than it would've taken us with our previous DR solution.

When you compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions, Zerto is a lot easier and faster because you can choose what to recover and when. In the event of a disaster, for instance, you can recover your most important stuff first.

Zerto certainly reduced the staff involved in a data recovery situation. It's so easy to use that one person can do it all in those events. You won't need a guy from the VMware team and another from the storage team. It's all done at the DM level, so, it's easier to recover without having to involve other teams. With our previous solution, we would have needed three to recover, and I was able to do it all myself with Zerto.

It absolutely helped to reduce our organization's DR testing because it's so fast and easy to test without disrupting anything. We can choose what to test, more critical versus noncritical, and how frequently we want to test. About 75% of that saved time is allocated to value-added tasks.

I would like to be able to replicate one to multiple without having to recreate every VPG. That would save us a lot of time. When we add a site or move our DR to a different site, I have to recreate everything from scratch. So, it'd be cool to be able to just repoint an existing VPG to a new site without having to recreate everything.

We started using Zerto in mid-2018.

We haven't had any issues with stability. It's always up and running. Whenever there's an issue at the DM level that affects it, it'll give an alert.

It seems like Zerto would be good for a big environment. Ours is small and doesn't really grow a lot; the size stays static. However, having worked with it for a few years I wouldn't be worried to use it in a bigger environment.

Zerto's technical support is good. Whenever we have issues, which is rare, they are fast to respond. When we had our major issue, I had a lot of calls with them, and we had to work around the clock. They did a good job of passing us through every time zone and keeping us engaged with someone. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We used the snapshot and replication of our SAN that we used to have. It wasn't necessarily a true DR replication tool, but it would do a snapshot and then put a copy of that snapshot somewhere else. That was our DR plan before switching to Zerto.

The initial setup was really easy and fast. We had it installed in less than an hour, maybe even half an hour. After that, we created our groups. The time for that would depend on how many DMs you have, but it's easy and intuitive.

We had someone from Zerto walk us through the installation and setup. They explained every step as we went through it, and it was excellent.

We certainly have seen an ROI. When we got hit, we saved a lot of money because we were able to recover RBMs. Without Zerto, we would have been in serious trouble. So, it definitely returned the investment many times over.

The pricing is pretty competitive to that of other options out there. When we shopped around, it was in line with the price of other solutions.

We looked at Veeam and Avamar. At that point, Zerto was the only one that did CDP, and that was the reason we went with Zerto.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate Zerto a ten.

Our main use case for this solution is the data center migration. We are in the process of moving from our legacy data center and all the VMs into our new data center.

In the future, we would like to look more into disaster recovery using Zerto but that's a much longer process and we are still looking into it.

The speed of recovery with Zerto is at least five to ten times faster. It helped us reduce downtime during migrations. There would've been a lot more downtime had we done a standard migration across data centers, powering everything down. This downtime would have cost our company millions.

The ease of use and simplicity in moving things without having to do a cross vCenter V-motions has been most valuable. It saves time and effort and it eliminates mistakes. This project would've been years if not for Zerto. We completed it in months instead of years.

The licensing is confusing and complicated.

I have been using this solution for two years.

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. We used it for our biggest data center and it handled it just fine. We haven't personally had to scale it up, but if we needed to, we definitely could.

Support has been pretty good. I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

I personally have not used other solutions other than just what's built into VMware. When comparing the VMware native solution versus Zerto, it's night and day. It's much simpler and straightforward to set up.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is streamlined with simple instructions. Anybody can do it as long as they understand their infrastructure.

We had a contractor that we brought in to help us with it. 

We have seen return in our investment with Zerto due to the speed and usability and being able to do this huge project with limited hiccups.

I would advise others that the cost of this solution is justified based on the value you receive. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

We use Zerto to help our customers migrate and consolidate data centers, especially crossing different geo spaces or long distances.

I haven't used it for downtime, but our customers have it configured for all of their disaster recovery needs.

We work a lot with customers that need disaster recovery and the best possible migration approaches, and Zerto helps them minimize the amount of effort it takes to finish their upgrades or migrations.

Zerto helped reduce our customer's VR testing. It allows them to do disaster recovery tests a lot better and a lot safer without affecting the production environment. Last year I helped two customers migrate over 10,000 servers across the country and across Europe. Automating the process was extremely valuable in those migrations.

The near-zero downtime for migrating from one data center to another has been the most valuable outcome of using Zerto. When you are migrating half a petabyte of data from Texas to Las Vegas, and you're doing that with 3000 servers, you have a limited time to take down the application and bring it up. Our customers like having the downtime minimized.

The biggest improvement would be exporting VPGs and a configuration of VPGs, as well as increasing or improving their IP customization rule set.

I have been using Zerto for seven years.

This is a stable solution. We ran into a minimal amount of bugs and the bugs that we do run into, we have workarounds for.

This solution can definitely scale out very well. I'm looking forward to new improvements in Zerto for Azure. These improvements would definitely make scaling out Zerto much better.

I would rate the support for this solution a ten out of ten. I've called Zerto's support for almost every case that I've needed to. They've been able to resolve the issues in a timely fashion.

Positive

I've used many other options. Zerto is definitely the best of the bunch. Zerto is definitely a lot easier to install than products like Set Recovery Manager, and it includes the replication technology that is agnostic from any storage replication that would be required.

Our customers definitely see a return on investment, especially with time savings, by doing required compliance testing for disaster recovery with a minimal amount of effort.

The pricing is top tier but offers good value. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

We use it mostly for VMs that are hosting client-facing applications and mostly client databases. We replicate 100 servers; we have 100 protected VMs.

We've never had any major headaches with the virtual-protection groups. They seem to work exactly as they should. If there's ever an issue with replication, we know right away, so it's all been very reliable.

Zerto is much easier to use than Veeam when you compare the two in terms of ease of use. Everything is very straightforward and simple in the Web Client. It's very clear if something is wrong, and everything in the Web Client works great. In Veeam, it's a little more complex; I find myself having to look through long error messages when a job fails. Whereas with Zerto, if I see a red VPG I can click on it. I would then know exactly which VM is having an issue, and I can try to troubleshoot the issue.

The time between releases is too long. Zerto doesn't seem to really keep up with the products with which they need to be compatible. For instance, the 9.5 updates 3 took about 90 days to come out after the latest version of vCenter 7.0 update 3 was released.

We were facing a vulnerability, so we had to choose between patching our vCenter to address that vulnerability, which would break the Zerto operability, or leaving it as is with a potential vulnerability. That was really the main issue we ever faced with Zerto.

I've been working with Zerto for the past three or so years, but my company used it before I started working there.

Zerto is very stable. I've never had an issue related to stability with Zerto, and anytime we have had any potential issues, we get alerts from Zerto. It has always been a simple fix. Also, the issue has never had to do with the platform; it's always been a VM that was powered off or deleted.

Technical support has been pretty sufficient. I've only had one or two cases ever that weren't related to looking for a release date, but I've had pretty good success with them so far.

I would give technical support a rating of eight out of ten. They've never particularly impressed me, but they've always done their job.

Positive

I was not present for the initial setup, but I deployed Zerto Virtual Manager. It was pretty straightforward. You walk through the wizard, and if you have all your networks on the server and everything is done correctly, you can start to build VPGs right away.

If you have all of the network and firewall rules already in place, you could probably stand up a new one in 45 minutes.

It's a pretty set-it-and-forget-it type of tool, and it's very reliable. So, I would rate it an eight on a scale from one to ten.