Zerto Reviews

We use the solution for two different data center sites. Inside the data centers we use VMware virtualization, NSX stretched VLANs and Dell servers. There are many servers, storage, virtualization, and a myriad of operating systems such as Red Hat and Windows Servers. 

We use Zerto to replicate our VMs from one site to the other, where we don't want to have to pay for two licenses of the same thing. We also do this to have high availability or to have the disaster recovery version of a piece of software. It is a benefit to be able to use Zerto to replicate that VM at the second site, and not have to power it on or anything. We know that it's always replicated on the other site. We currently use the solution for disaster recovery only but we are looking at longterm backup retention in the future.

I think it's perfect for providing continuous data protection for us, it is excellent. 

The most valuable feature is how simple it is to implement and how quickly you can get up and running at the second site. The solution is also extremely easy to use, for example, You just log onto the console and you can do a test failover with a few clicks. You can run a failover test for your auditors or your management. Afterwards, you can get a report on how easy it was to failover a specific application and the VMs associated with that application.

In future releases, doing backups of the environment we need to be able to do hot backups of the database. Granular based backups of the OS, versus taking a backup of the entire VMDK. Currently, I don't think we are able to do all that right now. Having an agent-based backup is a benefit because you can back up the OS files, and If you have an agent for the database, you can do a hot backup of the database and restore it. You then would have the ability to do an entire VMDK backup. I don't think that they have the ability to do a hot backup of a database itself via an agent or something similar.

I have been using this solution for four years.

We have a couple hundred people using the solution within the organization. The solution is very stable, you set it up and you can forget it. When we have had issues where we lost the connectivity to a data center, we were easily able to bring up the VMs of a data center that was available using Zerto.

It's very easy to add new hosts and the VRAs get to pull it out automatically. It's very easy to scale, at more sites. We are already increasing and adding more data centers that Zerto can protect for us. We are very pleased with it.

The customer service is stellar. They always answer and they are very helpful. I have had very good relationships with the sales executives and sales engineers. If the team at the technical support cannot get an issue solved, then our pre-sales engineers will get on calls with us and help us sort through problems. They have been great.

We were using SRM, VMware's Site Recovery Manager before we switched to Zerto. We did the switch because we were impressed with the demo that was given to us. Additionally, SRM was very complicated and cumbersome.

The setup was easy and demo replication was simple too. The initial process started by us building out the VMs of the virtual machines, as per their requirements. We deployed the manager, based on all the log information of the vCenter. You then select the data storage and it installs the VRA out on your environment. Once that is done, you put together the virtual protection groups and you build out your replication site, it is very easy.

Our deployment took about a month to go through everything with three different staff members and for the maintenance, we have one technician. Make sure that we grouped everything properly together, based on the network and its functions, and how it should be brought back up etc.

I have saved days and even weeks of working time from using the solution. We are in the process right now of designing a new cloud infrastructure for one of our environments to utilize Zerto to replicate our VMs to our cloud. It is going to be a huge time saver, probably saving us a couple hundred thousand dollars. We've definitely seen some good return on investment with it. Our auditors are impressed by it. 

This solution is far less expensive than SRM and NetBackup. After the standard licencing cost there is an annual support contract, nothing that we were shocked about.

We have also used NetBackup but Zerto was much easier to set up.

When trying to think of improvements I cannot think of anything to critiques at this time because it does behave so amazingly well. I've been involved with other SRM implementations and SRM is very complicated to put together and to configure, whereas Zerto is just so easy out of the box. Overall, the solution probably has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars or maybe millions.

Some of the important lessons we have learned are you need to plan your DR carefully. That is the most important. Also, make sure that your applications are grouped together, be cognizant of the different virtual networks they go into. For example, If you have a web frontend DMZ that goes into one component, where the application and the database are in another place. You need to be careful on what networks you are sending them to at the replication site, be aware of that.

I highly recommend Zerto. I speak about the product all the time. I think that it is priceless what it does for us. 

I rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

We've been using it to consolidate data centers. We have 13 hospitals and two main data centers and a cloud presence. We're trying to collapse everything. We've been using Zerto to move the workloads over to our primaries.

It's allowed us to save a lot of money by collapsing a few data centers. We have been able to evacuate the hardware in the one data center in our virtual environment, and then shut down and get rid of all those hosts. And it has saved us time in our failovers, from collapsing data centers to our primaries. It enabled us to do that on the fly.

One of the valuable features is the ability to re-IP on the fly, because it makes the migration a lot smoother on the system end.

The syncing of the replication needs improvement. My experience has been that, every once in a while, when you go to do a failover, it tells you it's not syncing. Then you have to troubleshoot and figure out why it's not fully synced up.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

It's pretty stable.

I've never had to use the technical support.

We use VMware SRM pretty exclusively for our disaster recovery stuff. SRM and Zerto are very similar in the way they work. Zerto enables features that SRM doesn't give us and that's why we purchased it.

Also, it takes half as much time to failover with Zerto as it does with SRM. Every six months we do a failover of our Epic environment from one data center to another, and we use SRM for that. We've been using Zerto for failovers from one data center to another for data center consolidation, and those seem to happen a lot faster than SRM.

We've definitely gotten our money's worth out of it for what we've been doing. We have been able to close three data centers so far.

We looked at Veeam, but that was a long time ago.

We're using it for site plate replication and fail-over or disaster recovery. We're primarily using it to replicate between the data centers that we own and operate.

We've had a few disasters where we've had a site go out and we've had outages or hardware failures. However, with a single click, we can have all of the failover and when the other sites come back up, it can auto re-replicate in the reverse direction so there is no extra manpower required. Whereas, normally, we would be spending hours and hours cleaning up from the failover event.

We enjoy the simplicity of not only configuring replication but failing over with a single click and then having it automatically reverse replication. We've had other products such as Veeam, and their replication works, however, it's very cumbersome to configure. When you failover, there's a bunch of work you have to do after the fact to reverse the direction and to restore the VM and how it names it and which environment it shows up in.

In terms of continuous data protection, it's the best product that we've found that does this. It's not snapshot-based. It's continuous, so there are no specific points in time we have to worry about recovering to or from. It's pretty much any time, as long as it's within our replication window.

The solution is very easy to use. It's very straightforward. You don't really have to do a lot of reading through the documentation, or things like that. You can basically scroll through the menu and figure it out.

We have not had ransomware, so we haven't had to deal with that, however, we definitely had a disaster recovery issue we had where we had the fail-over site stop unexpectedly. It did save us a bit of data loss, whereas, normally, we would have lost six hours' worth of customer data. In this case, it was seamless. We lost seconds' worth.

The solution has reduced downtime. It has done so a couple of times. There could be some cost savings there. It's just not something we calculate.

The backup solution needs to be improved. From our perspective, Veeam and Zerto were competing products. They both do very unique things that they're very good at. For instance, Veeam can do replication well. However, it's really a backup product. Zerto can do backup, and yet it's really a disaster recovery product. It would be great if they could improve upon the backup functionality, or continually improve. We've seen some improvements, however, if they continue improving upon that it may eventually eliminate the need for the other product.

I've been using the solution for about three years.

The solution is very stable. We haven't had any issues. The only issue we had was a DHCP issue where we didn't static a couple of the DVMs, which is the agent for each ESX host, and we were having a few gaps in replication when the IPs would change, however, we've stacked those and that has resolved that issue.

We find that it's very easily scalable. The resource overhead is very minimal so it's really easy to scale up the environment and the product kind of automates the process for you. You select where you want it, hit install, and it handles it for you.

About five people use the product in our company. We have some system administrators, we have a couple of programmers and we have a DBA.

We have around a quarter of our environment replicated with Zerto. It's mostly our critical infrastructure.

We may possibly increase usage over time.

Technical support is good. I'd give it an eight out of ten. They're pretty quick to respond. They are almost always able to resolve my issue. I have no complaints. I only had a couple of support tickets, however, the experience was pretty good.

That said, their web portal is a bit clunky to navigate. For example, putting in a request, knowing where to go, or pulling up documentation or upgrading information wasn't quite as intuitive as it could be.

We are still using Veeam mostly for backup tasks. We use Zerto for site recovery.

The initial setup was very straightforward and easy.

The installation was simple. There are lots of guides and information. There are YouTube videos. They had training classes that were free that you can go to and they have a little lab environment. Even without the assistance offered, the way you install it is very straightforward and very simple. Really anybody can run the installer and have an idea of what they're doing right out of the gate without really any training.

Deployment took around a day.

We did have a specific deployment plan and we were able to execute that in about a day. Getting all the sites set up and then the VMs replicated was fast.

We have five people on staff that can handle deployment and maintenance.

We didn't use an integrator or consultant. We just did it ourselves.

There's not a direct ROI as it's being used as an insurance policy. The only time it really benefits us is when something bad happens.

It's reasonably affordable. Obviously, cheaper would always be better, however, it's not out of the expected range. We are just paying by VM. It's my understanding there are no extra fees.

I can't remember the companies off the top of my head as it's been a few years since we've done it, however, we evaluated five or ten different options that were popular at the time. Some of them were integrated with hardware. Some of them were software only.

In the end, it came down to Zerto due to simplicity. It's very simple and straightforward. It removes all the overhead of management and knowing what is active or what's the standby copy. It handles all of those pieces for you.

We're probably on the latest version or one version behind.

We very lightly use the product for very specific things. We have a couple of things that are very high data rate, very high IO, for which we cannot use traditional snapshot-based technology and we are using that to do a long-term backup.

The solution has not reduced the number of staff involved in data recovery situations. We have maintained exactly what we had. It's simplified it so it's possible to have a reduction, however, we haven't done any reduction from that.

The biggest piece of advice I could give is if you want the best-in-class for failover and replication, as well as ease of management, there is no better product that I've seen so far. Whether hardware or software combinations, this has been the simplest deployment and it just works.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten.

One of our biggest use cases has been migrations. We migrated the virtual machines in one of our data centers using Zerto.

We're in the middle of a migration that Zerto has made much easier. We also use it for many standard disaster recovery cases. It constantly keeps our services running.

Zerto's near-synchronous replication is a key component. It's essential.

Zerto enables disaster recovery in the cloud, which is very important. It creates another level of protection to have an alternate location outside of on-premises.

It helps protect VMs in our environment. It's certainly better than a traditional nightly backup.

I've found the migration feature very valuable. It starts like a disaster recovery scenario where you're just replicating the VMs. Then it all gets synced up, and you decide when to make the cutover. 

This is instead of having to do a more traditional conversion of the VMs or shutting them down and migrating the data, which is less efficient.

The seamlessness of a cutover is very helpful.

I have been using Zerto for around five years. 

It offers good stability. 

We haven't scaled it too much, but in our experience, we haven't had any issues with it.

We still use a different disaster recovery solution but for different use cases. 

Zerto didn't completely replace our other backup solutions.

There are cost savings for the migration in particular.

From the migration standpoint, they're flexible with the licensing. You own the license and can apply it to a machine and then pull it back, apply it to another machine, and so on.

For the migration piece, we evaluated different solutions but not for the disaster recovery replication. We knew from the migration piece that it would work well.

For me, it's a ten. I haven't had any issues with it so far. 

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. 

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.

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 primarily use Zerto for replication and disaster recovery.

Zerto is good in terms of providing continuous data protection. We have databases that require point in time recovery capability and Zerto is very flexible in this regard, compared with some other solutions we use, such as Sybase Replication and Oracle Replication.

We do not yet use Zerto's long-term retention feature but we are planning to do so. Currently, we are exploring AWS Glacier for long-term retention, and we will see how Zerto can help with the process.

Using Zerto has helped to simplify our process. The DBS steps are very deeply involved in the case of Sybase replication. This means that it takes a lot of technical skill, time, and effort to manage Sybase replication. Compared with that, Zerto is very user-friendly.

When we need to failback or move workloads, Zerto decreases both the number of highly skilled people involved and the time it takes to complete. For example, to do a command-line restore and recovery of Sybase involves pages of steps and it requires a talented DBA. However, with Zerto, we can take care of that with an intern. Only one person is involved in the process for either case, but with Zerto, fewer skills and experience in recovery are needed.

Fortunately, we have not yet been the victim of a ransomware attack. However, I am confident that Zerto can help, should that situation occur. Similarly, since implementing Zerto, we have not had any downtime. That said, we have simulated different scenarios and our results were good.

The most valuable feature is the point in time recovery. This allows us to recover at any point in time, up to a minute or so.

Zerto is pretty user-friendly. Normally, data recovery involves a lot of DBS skills but with Zerto, it is point-and-click.

It is very important to us that Zerto provides both backup and disaster recovery in a single platform. Because of problems that people are facing, we needed to have recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) for the major cloud providers. This is the primary reason that we were looking for an up-to-date and current solution.

I am a little bit worried about how Zerto will work with large volumes of data, such as replication for big data and very large files. I have not tested it yet, so I can't say for sure whether it will choke or not.

The two large clouds that we use are AWS and Azure, and compatibility with these is always important for us.

We have been using Zerto for approximately five years. We are using one version back from the current one.

In terms of stability, so far it looks okay but I am not sure how Zerto will react to volume loads. We haven't had a chance to test that because we don't have such a large environment.

Scalability has been good but I have yet to see how large a file it can handle.

We have two DBAs using the product, and then we have some interns to help out.

Currently, it is running in a small network where it is backing up a couple of replicated environments. We may increase our usage in the future, as we are now just beginning to back up everything to AWS.

Zerto's technical support team is pretty knowledgeable.

Prior to Zerto, we were using Sybase replication. When Sybase was acquired by SAP, we began having trouble when we needed technical support. The reason that we started looking for a replacement product is that we used to contact technical support in California when we needed help. However, we now have to call Germany first, only to have them redirect the call to California. SAP is a mess.

I was involved in setting up the proof of concept, and I found that the initial setup was okay.

Once the PoC was complete, we went into small volume testing and then started using it after that. The deployment only took us a couple of hours.

A couple of people from our organization handled the deployment, and we had some Zerto technical reps available to answer questions. The Zerto staff are pretty knowledgeable and they answered the questions well.

Compared to the licensing fees with Oracle and SAP, we see a return on investment.

Price-wise, Zerto is fairly reasonable and I can't complain about it when we compare it against Oracle and SAP licensing.

We have not tried using any features that are outside of the standard licensing fees.

We looked into Oracle GoldenGate but it is pretty expensive and cumbersome. Sybase is better than Oracle in terms of pricing, but Zerto is cheaper.

We have not yet enabled data recovery in the cloud, but we are planning to use it. As of now, we haven't tested it. We always back things up but in terms of restoring and testing, we are behind.

My advice for anybody who is considering this product is that it is pretty user-friendly compared to Oracle and SAP. This is a good solution to start with. Once it has been implemented, I suggest moving to volume testing to see how well it handles large volumes of data.

We have never had a real situation where we were under the gun for the purpose of RTO and RPO recovery times. As such, I can't say for sure how it will behave in a real situation but we are satisfied with our tests.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.