HPE Zerto Software Reviews

In the past, we were predominantly using Citrix Hypervisor in the Hyper-V shop. Now that we've moved to VMware, we utilize Zerto to move those VMs from Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor over to VMware.

We're also looking at utilizing it for our DR site to be able to push up those VMs to the remote site in the case of a DR situation.

Zerto improved our organization by giving us flexibility back with migrating VMs, and I look forward to the future when we utilize it more for DR situations.

The feature I've found most valuable so far has been the ability to migrate the VMs from Hyper-V and Citrix Hypervisor. It's made our migration seamless. In the beginning, we were looking at freeware tools, and it was just a massive headache. Zerto solved a lot of the roadblocks that we'd run into in the past.

We've been able to set up a set schedule of moving certain VMs on certain dates, and we've been pretty confident that it's going to go smoothly without interruptions.

When you compare the ease of use of Zerto with those of other solutions, Zerto is much easier to use. It's idiot-proof. You don't have to be super technical to be able to be successful with the product. This is nice because you can delegate some of the tasks to the service desk. For example, you could have them handle the migrations, which would free up your engineering team to be able to spend time on more important projects.

Zerto helped reduce downtime every week. We have VMs that run in Hyper-V every week, and at night, we shut them down and migrate them over to VMware. The whole process takes under an hour, so these VMs are only offline for maybe an hour at the absolute most, which has been really helpful.

I believe 15 minutes of downtime is equivalent to a million in cost. So, it would probably cost our organization four to five million per hour of downtime.

I had to have my colleague contact technical support because we had an issue where VMs in VMware were getting blocked, and we weren't able to delete them.

The company as a whole has been using it for about six months now, and I've been using it for three months since I joined the company.

I've been pretty impressed with Zerto's stability. I haven't had any weird issues with the UI or with the migration aspect of it. It's been pretty rock solid.

Since I started, we've more than doubled our server capacity, and Zerto has been able to keep up just fine. So, it's definitely scalable, and we're looking to increase capacity by another 25% or 50%. I'm pretty confident that Zerto will be able to keep up with it.

I had to have my colleague contact technical support because we had an issue where VMs in VMware were getting blocked, and we weren't able to delete them. The whole issue was resolved in less than three days, which means that the technical support is probably pretty good to be able to get the issue sorted out so quickly.

I've tried to use Veeam for migration, and it's not really built for that. There was also a freeware solution. It worked okay, but we tended to run into some weird issues, specifically with EFI and regular BIOS VMs; these VMs weren't really translating properly to VMware.

I've been told that when they originally got the quote, it was a little bit of a sticker shock. However, now that we've actually been using it for six months, I've been told that the investment was well worth it.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Zerto a ten.

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.

Positive

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 DR and general backup. We have snapshots or shadow copies with Microsoft and we do Zerto backups to our other locations so we can always get the data back.

We bought Zerto, in the beginning, to migrate a very important system of the airline from a co-lo that was managed by the co-lo to our on-prem. As an airline, you can't be down because you could cause a ground stop. With Zerto, we were able to migrate all those things across to on-prem without touching anything or losing any time. We took very little downtime.

Also, we've run into some situations where, for some reason, Windows has lost some of the files. I have been able to fail it over to our other data center and they were back up in 10 minutes.

The speed of recovery with Zerto versus other disaster recovery solutions is vastly better. Whereas with the others, I'd have to spin through a lot of stuff and find things, with Zerto I can scroll back in the GUI, find the one I want, and restore it. If that's not right, I can destroy it and go back a little bit more in time.

And our being an ultra-low-cost airline, we don't have staff, so it helps in that way.

It has also helped our DR testing because we can fail over the main part that runs the airline within 45 minutes. The first time, it took me an hour and a half. The second time, it took about an hour. The last time I did it, it took about 45 minutes. That's within the timeframe of one hour where we don't have to do a ground stop.

Moving the VPGs from one location to another is a valuable feature. You just click on it and move it and it's done. We have a stretch VLAN between our data centers so it's really easy: this is IP here and the same IP is there. So if something happens or somebody wants to test something, I can fail it over.

Another aspect that I use a lot is that I can fail it over into its own little bubble and I can install software that I want to test to make sure it doesn't break something. I can do that and then roll it all back.

If there is a mass of changes to a server, Zerto will restart the replication. It would be nice to know why that happens. 

The other thing that I've run into lately is that when I've done a whole bunch of upgrades to systems, so they're offline, they get stuck in a pending state. You can never get them out so you have to delete and start all over again. It would be nice if they could make it a little simpler to figure out what's wrong.

I have been using Zerto for about six years.

It always just runs. I don't have to worry about it or keep checking it. It just does its thing.

It's very scalable. Fortunately, we bought a bunch of licenses when we first bought it and we've been growing into those licenses over the years. It has been very scalable for us.

The technical support has been good, although I've had a couple of situations where they've said some things that were totally inaccurate. But you have that in all organizations.

Positive

Since I started with this airline, we have gone through two other solutions. Zerto is the third and we've stuck with it for quite a few years.

One of the other solutions was a direct product that dumped everything to a storage area in the cloud and it never was consistent. The other was a Dell application backup that no longer exists. That was just too limiting and its backup was never consistent.

Zerto is much easier to use. Once you get the concept down of what it's doing, it's really easy to bring up backups, restore backups, move things around, and test things. It's very easy.

I had one of their sales reps in Colorado help me through the setup. Then we just took it over.

The ROI is in "funny money." It's my time and how long something is down or how long it takes somebody to restore something, and that is much faster.

The pricing seems really good. We're an enterprise customer, so we get all the bells and whistles.

We evaluated a couple of things, but one of our co-los was actually using Zerto so we looked at it as a result. That is what led us to buy it.

We use it for disaster recovery, by replicating to our DR data center.

It has simplified our disaster recovery plan. With VMware SRM it was a little bit more complex. Zerto adds more granularity, but not at the expense of complexity.

The most important features are the 

• simplicity of recovery 
• wider capabilities and feature sets than SRM has.

I have been using Zerto for about three years.

We've been using it since version 7. Since then, it's gotten better and better. We've had some bad experiences with DR tests where everything went sideways and we had to restore a bunch of VPGs or recreate them. It seems like those situations are happening less and less as the product develops.

We have 1,200 seats and we have about 1,000 VMs that are replicated. So far, scalability hasn't really been an issue. We haven't run into a problem scaling it out.

I haven't been a super big fan of the support area. The support could really be better in terms of responsiveness. I've had some issues that took two or three days to get resolved. Once I got to the right person, they were resolved quickly, but it took a while to get to that person.

On a scale of one to 10, today I would rate their support at about a seven. If you had asked me two years ago, I would have rated it at three.

Neutral

We were an SRM customer and moved to Zerto. We had issues with SRM and I think we had some issues with Zerto initially. We've had it for three years and we've gone through several revisions. With every revision, it seems to get better. They keep adding feature sets.

SRM and Zerto are really the primary competitors. We like the fact that Zerto does VM-based replication instead of having to involve storage-based replication. You can just point to an instance of it and say, "Replicate to this DR data center," whereas SRM is a little bit more complex in that context.

The speed of recovery between Zerto and SRM is similar. With the later versions of Zerto, the recovery speed has become a little bit faster.

It's very straightforward to set up. You just install the software and point it at your vCenter. There are not really a lot of overly complex parts to the installation. It installs relatively easily and quickly.

We did it ourselves.

We haven't seen ROI because we've not ever had to recover anything. But in an instance where we would have to recover from a disaster, we would definitely see ROI. It's like paying for insurance. You don't really see any value in it until you need it.

The licensing is a little bit steep, but there is some value that you do get for it as well.

In our usage, Zerto has not helped to reduce downtime or the number of staff involved in a data recovery situation. It also hasn't reduced our DR testing. We do a DR test regularly and that is about the same as it was.

I don't have any advice, but I would absolutely recommend it. The simplicity of how they have laid out the VPG structure, and being able to separate those out into groups, as opposed to SRM where you're replicating everything, seems like it's really well designed.

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.

We use it to protect VMs. Disaster recovery is our use case. Our compliance requires that we need to simulate a DR exercise every six months if we are protecting a VM. One of the features of Zerto is simulating a disaster recovery exercise in case of failure. We fail back the VM to the DR site, and when the event is over, we fail it back to the production site.

We are using one of the newer releases, but we are still six months behind.

It meets our SLAs for RPOs and RTOs.

• Replication
• Failover and failback for DR

It needs more documentation and automation features. I would like more documentation on designing an environment and network operations. On the automation side, I would like automation to clean up the environment in cases of a failed DR effort. An API interface to perform the DR exercise would also be nice.

I have been using Zerto for seven years.

It is stable. We have had no big problems. 

There have been a few minor upgrades.

It is scalable. From a few hundred to 5,000, it has been pretty easy to scale, not only horizontally, but also vertically.

Zerto is protecting a couple thousand VMs.

The support is very good with quick response times. They are helpful. If you open a session, they will take over and immediately solve your problem. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

We have used SRM and Veeam. 

Zerto is a better product. It has more modern features. It is easy to use. It also has a good interface with command line for scripts.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The solution is easy to implement. You implement it and it starts working out-of-the-box. There is not much configuration required. It takes a couple of hours to have it up and running, protecting you.

We deployed the system ourselves.

We have seen ROI with the RTOs, RPOs, and speed of recovery.

Using Zerto, you can have your VM up and running in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is flip a switch, then you are good to go.

For speed of recovery, Zerto is faster than SRM. SRM takes more time and needs some manual effort. Veeam is pretty good and on par with Zerto.

Do a PoC. You can compare it with other products, like SRM and Veeam. Then, you will see that difference. It is good to have the solution working in a lab. Or, engage Zerto who can assist you in building a lab for it.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

We have a production environment that we are replicating to a warm data center, and Zerto keeps our virtual machine-protected groups in continuous sync. It has been working really well for us.

It's given us a sense of trust that if we have to fail over in a DR situation, it's going to be kind of like Apple, it just works. It gives us peace of mind.

We use it to help protect VMs and its effect on our RPOs is that it is exceeding what we set out to achieve. And the RTO is exactly what we're looking for.

It has also helped to reduce our DR testing. It's at least 300 percent faster than our previous solution.

I would give it an eight out of 10, if not a nine out of 10, when it comes to ease of use.

It's hard to say where it could be improved. The few times I've had issues with the interface, which is, for the most part, intuitive, we have been able to take care of most issues without having to open a case.

There are a couple of areas in the interface that are not very intuitive. Most of them are pretty easy, but there are a few areas in the journal and replication that, unless you've done it before, you really have no idea what to do. When I get to those points I'll reach out and ask for a little assistance or do a Google search to find the solution to the problem that we're having. 

I have been using Zerto for around seven years.

I'm very impressed with the stability of the solution.

We haven't had to scale it up yet from the initial licensing that we got, but it seems pretty straightforward that, if we grow, it can grow right along with us, and it's pretty easy.

We have not done anything other than replicate to a warm data center for DR purposes. We have not looked into taking it to the cloud, but that may be something we'll do in the future.

Their technical support is pretty good. The few times I've had to open a case, the response has been a little bit slow in the sense that it's almost like they want me to prove my need for a case; more than I think should be necessary.

If I'm looking for help, I need help, and their first response is to tell me to run logs and to put them up, and "Are you sure you covered this and that?" I have to tell them, "I'm already past that point and I'm ready to speak to somebody."

That would be the only thing that could use some improvement, having quicker access to somebody I can speak to, or at least email with, without having to jump through a lot of hoops first.

Neutral

We used VMware's SRM, which is their site-to-site replication solution. We made the switch because we needed something that actually worked. VMware SRM was very complex, very clunky, and it was constantly falling behind our RPO. Zerto is lean and mean and gets the job done, and I don't have to babysit it.

Also, the ease of use is much better than anything we have used before.

I was amazed at the ease of the installation and how quickly it went. I actually did the install with the support engineer looking over my shoulder, and it was done in 30 minutes.

We went through a reseller to purchase the product, but it was the Zerto engineer and I who did the actual install.

We were pretty happy with the pricing. When we switched to Zerto, we were a little on the small side of things. Zerto was looking at more of a larger-environment customer base. We're in at the bottom tier of supported servers, but they gave us a very good price. It was really a no-brainer for us to be able to have such a good product for our size environment. They came down and met us in the middle and gave us an enterprise-quality product for our mid- to small-size business needs.

It's been a while since we have looked around. We came from VMware, and there were at least two others. Cisco had a product, and IBM had a product, and they were way overpriced.

It has been very consistent in keeping up with our RPO and RTO and we have been very happy with it.

Zerto hasn't replaced our other backup solutions, just so that we have redundancy. We don't own the license for long-term retention with Zerto, so we have an offsite backup in addition to the production environment replication.

Give it a shot. It's quick, it's easy, and reliable, and you can run an evaluation pretty inexpensively. You just need another location that you can replicate to for that.

We use it for a hot DR site for our primary production environment, allowing us to fail over all of our production servers in case of an emergency.

We are in a much better position as far as our data protection scheme is concerned, with Zerto. Compared to where we were before, it's a night and day difference, because we didn't have the ability to immediately fail over our production environment. The difference is pretty extreme for our organization. We went from just having SAN snapshots to Veeam backups, and now we have replication.

It massively decreases the time needed for us to fail back because, before, we had no way to do so for our workload. It would have been a manual process to move our workload somewhere else. We would have had to get the VMs off of the existing infrastructure and we would have had to create a whole new infrastructure and get them running somewhere else. That could take two to three weeks, in an emergency situation, with our entire team working on it, versus just pushing a button and moving it right now. We're in a whole different realm now.

There would also be massive savings in manpower to do that. We would have to create a whole new infrastructure, whether in AWS, Azure, or even procuring physical equipment and deploying it. Now that we have Zerto in place, it's there waiting and being replicated too.

The fact that it just works is important to us. We don't have to do a whole lot to it. It does its thing in the background and it's ready to go. It enables us to execute our DR plan at any time that is required. It doesn't seem to require a lot of time or management or day-to-day maintenance. 

It doesn't "complain" a lot and it's ready to go at any time, so you could call it easy to use. It's just me responsible for maintaining it, and there is a network infrastructure person involved as well. But it mostly maintains itself, once it has been deployed.

It does what it's purported to do, which is to provide continuous data protection. We have a five-second RPO. It's definitely doing its job. It's there in the background, replicating constantly.

I would like to see them continuously improve Zerto's automated functions, such as putting hosts in maintenance mode within vSphere and not having to worry as much about how Zerto is going to react. Rather, Zerto should be able to handle putting various hosts, within either the source or destination side, into maintenance mode without having to worry about the vRA appliances. Sometimes, Zerto almost holds the vSphere environment hostage when it comes to taking certain actions. You really need to be cognizant about what you're about to do. They should further automate that and increase Zerto's ability to handle things like that in a very slick, automated way, without intervention.

Zerto could also build more canned automation tools within their product, tools that automatically work with DNS updates to AWS or Azure. Maybe they could provide an area for scripting help or canned scripts, a community or a place where people could grab some scripting. Maybe they could reach into Citrix or F5 load balancer APIs.

Also, if you have a host go wrong or you need to put one in maintenance in an emergency situation, especially on the source side, it can require you to fix Zerto and redeploy vRAs or redeploy the little appliances to the host that they're going to be on.

Also, depending on what resources it has available, storage or vSphere-wise, I'd like to see it able to balance itself out within the virtual environment, with its storage usage on the destination side.

I've only run into these things briefly, so I can't speak about them at the deepest technical level, but I have noticed that they're not as perfect as they could be.

I have been using Zerto for three months at my current company, but I have about two years' experience with it in total.

For the most part, it has been stable. There have been a few points where I have had to delete the VPG group, re-replicate data, and start over, to get things back to a good spot. But overall it has been pretty stable.

We are only protecting 45 VMs. We're not a large, multinational, so I can't really speak about its scalability.

I haven't used the technical support very much.

We didn't have a previous solution, other than SAN snapshots. That's why we looked to put something in place. Previously, we were in a tenuous situation that would make anyone nervous. We went in this direction so that we wouldn't have to be nervous.

It didn't seem that difficult to set up. 

It took a couple of days, but that didn't include setting up the SAN and the secondary sites and all of the infrastructure around having it work directly. But just the Zerto solution itself did not take very long at all to set up.

Everything that we needed to do to facilitate the use of the solution was more involved and took a month or so. At the time, we also deployed a Veeam solution to do the long-term storage, and that was wrapped up in the same project, so it's hard to give an exact amount of time for the deployment. 

Everyone knows Zerto is a little on the expensive side, but what else is there on the market that does the same thing? It is more expensive per client, for what it does, compared to a backup product like Veeam.

We didn't really go into a full evaluation of other solutions. We took the recommendation of our VAR. They're a company that provides us with help in implementing projects. They recommended going to Zerto, and I had already used Zerto before at another company, so I was comfortable with that recommendation.

Zerto serves a very specific purpose in our environment, which is to fail over the entire environment in an emergency, very quickly. Veeam claims to be able to do that, but I don't think it does it as quickly or efficiently as Zerto.

The main thing is to make sure your network infrastructure is designed properly. Zerto is only going to be as successful as the network infrastructure and the automation that is created around it to help with a failover situation.

In our particular situation, we have a stretch network situation, which means we don't really have to do a lot of the automated scripting that most people might have to do, surrounding re-IP-ing the environment and DNS updates. We're in a unique situation. Because we are a telco, we own our entire network and we have the ability to stretch our network to a location that's a state away. That scenario doesn't apply to a lot of other business situations. Other institutions may not have that luxury, in which case their scripted automation, and how well that is set up, would be critical.

Because we weren't doing backup and DR management before, Zerto has probably increased the amount of staff we need. You don't need staff in place for things that you aren't doing.

HPE bought Nimble and made Nimble not as good. Hopefully, the HPE acquisition won't have a negative effect on Zerto. That's a deep concern among all people who have had to deal with things that HPE bought. They need to keep to the original intention and vision without diluting it within some other HPE product or some other HPE offering. I have no interest in seeing Zerto losing its functionality or having it rebranded as some other problematic HPE solution. We bought this as a purpose-built solution to do exactly what we want and that's the way we would like it to stay.