Zerto Reviews

We use Zerto at our remote locations as a backup solution in environments where we don't have the infrastructure for redundancy. It allows us to use two HPE DL380 servers as stand-alone VMware hosts and replicate the VMs without needing shared storage.

Using Zerto, we are able to replicate / backup our VMs and between servers and locations, without the need for shared storage, which provides redundancy in case of hardware failure.  We are able to fail the VMs over to the secondary host, which also allows us to patch or repair hardware without extended downtime. 

We use to use VMware replication appliances to attempt to replicate our VMs to remote locations and servers, but Zerto's one-to-many replication options with deduplication have made the process much simpler without having to constantly worry about the versions of each driver.

The number one thing we have found we would like changed so far is the cost per VM. It would be great to get that pricing reduced.

The need for a VM to be spun up on every host is challenging. In our remote locations, it's not a big issue, but as we look to use that in our main data center where we have hundreds of hosts, it becomes more daunting.

I have been using this solution for six months.

In the six months that we have used it, we have not had any issues.

So far, it looks like it should scale to our entire environment of over three thousand VMs.

Prior to this solution, we use to use SRM. We were looking to switch because SRM continues to be troublesome and requires a select combination of drivers and versions across the environment to work correctly.

This initial setup was pretty straightforward with the exception of needing a VM on every single host.

The cost per VM is a bit high.

We also looked at RapidDR from HPE but it only works on our HPE SimpliVity servers and not across all of our hardware.

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 were able to replace most of VMware SRM with this solution. It allows us to failover individual machines or application clusters with ease. The one thing that it does not do nicely is a full site failover. We have never needed that aspect though (only for testing).

We have leveraged the individual server failovers a number of times, and it has saved us a lot of man hours (doing things such as rebuilding, fighting viruses, or forcing more servers to failover than we wanted). It has been a phenomenal addition, and proved its worth in the pilot phase, when it saved us from having to rebuild a machine that was included in our pilot trial.

Journaling allows us to leverage Zerto's journal for sub-minute recoveries, instead of having to wait for the storage array to replicate. The solution is well worth the money invested.

The full site recovery is not up to SRM standards. Within a VPG, you can do great failover timing as well as ordering and scripting, but if your site contains many VPGs (as mine does), then it is difficult to manage failing over between sites, especially if you are at the site that was impacted.

None. Even the upgrades are speedy and easy. 

None. As long as you have the licenses, it goes smoothly.

I have contacted their vendor support in regards to backup performance of SQL databases. They provided me with adequate instruction and background information to be able to adjust my environment to better suit Zerto's processes. It's been smooth sailing since.

VMware Site Recovery Manager. We changed from this vendor because we hit the 75 license threshold and were forced to consider the conversion to Enterprise. We searched the marketplace and Zerto was a great fit for our needs.

It was straightforward and easy. I was able to install it myself without any help from Zerto.

In-house was all that was necessary. It only required one engineer to work for about two hours to install everything, and then a week to configure and protect the entire environment. This will vary depending on your link to your DR site.

The cost is steep, but once you experience recovering a single server along with its granular restore times, you will see that the cost is justified.

We evaluated Unitrends.

Make sure that you understand the limitations of any software before you dive in. Make sure you document your use cases and have the vendor show you how it can perform those tasks.

There are many valuable features. However, the one that sticks out the most is the simplicity of the process to protect or migrate a virtual workload.

It enables protection of a virtual workload to be done by the app, whether single or multi-tiered, with a boot time scheduler. It is pretty awesome.

Zerto has changed how we think about protecting virtual workloads. It has enabled us to think about real time protection with full replication that provides checkpoints every few seconds and enables quick (< 10min) recovery times.

Zerto is solid. However, they are working on a cloud workload protection and protecting virtual workloads to more than one site. This is good stuff.

We have been using the product for more than two years.

Zerto is stable and works as expected.

Zerto scales as you scale your virtual environments. It simply and quickly protects virtual workloads.

Zerto’s support is good. They are quick to contact you back and get working on any issue. This is hard to get from other vendors.

I have been performing DR/migrations/replication for over 15 years. I changed during a bake-off of different products based on:

• Speed to setup and run
• Low to no dependencies
• Simple to use (easy to operationalize)

Zerto simply is the tool for protecting any virtual workload. I have set up and protected:

• DBs (DB2, SQL, Oracle)
• Many apps (Wintel and Linux)
• Virtual appliances.

It is extremely simple to set up and use.

The Zerto setup was straightforward. It is one of the simplest tools I have ever deployed to protect virtual workloads. It works hand in hand with VMware features such as DRS/HA, so there is no issue when your workload moves around.

Zerto’s licensing model has changed a bit over the last year and they are in alignment with others. It is pretty simple and more economical.

We evaluated PlateSpin, Recover Point/Recover Point 4 VMs, VMW SRM, Veeam, and VMW converter.

Put it in place as it will become your default tool for VM protection and replication, hands down!

We are using Zerto for disaster recovery. By implementing Zerto, we wanted fast recovery time.

It helps to meet recovery point objectives. Management is simplified. Its automation capabilities simplify the management of the disaster recovery processes.

It reduces the burden on the IT staff. It is also cost-effective. We could realize its benefits only in eight months.

Disaster recovery through the cloud is very important for our organization. We want to ensure that we are able to retrieve data in a proper manner.

Zerto helps to protect VMs in our environment. It replicates a lot quicker than what we were using previously. There is a reduction in the time taken to replicate. It takes a quarter of the time and protects our VM environment.

Zerto has been very good for our RPOs. It has been within seconds for us. It has also helped us to meet our RTOs.

It is easy to migrate data. We have not had any challenges. Zerto provides the ability to keep our users collaborating with one another during a data migration. It is very useful for a smooth migration process. 

Zerto helped to reduce our organization's DR testing. It saved three to four hours. 

Zerto has reduced the number of staff involved in overall backup and DR management. Instead of ten people, we now have seven people.

It is cost-effective and stable. It protects virtual machines, and there is a fast recovery time.

It works well. It is simple to set up. It works a lot quicker than what we were using previously. It takes about a quarter of the time. It is important for our organization.

One thing I would like to see in their roadmap is introducing long-term storage in the cloud such as Azure or AWS. They can make it more seamless.

The downtime features can also be improved.

I have been using Zerto for one and a half years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. It can scale based on the growth of the organization.

We have about 25 people using this solution. It is being used in multiple regions.

Their customer support is good. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We were using the disaster management solution of AWS. We switched to Zerto because of cost management and recovery point objectives. They were offering real-time replication and automation to help our organization achieve its RPOs and RTOs. We wanted better recovery time. 

Zerto is also easier to use than other solutions.

Its initial setup is good. Its implementation took one month.

It is easy to maintain.

We had support from Zerto.

We have definitely seen a return on investment.

It is cost-effective.

We did not evaluate other options.

I would recommend Zerto to others. I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten.

The two key features for AssureStor are hypervisor based replication and the automation for failover, testing and failback.

As a cloud service provider we are always looking at how we can reduce risk for our customers, the ability to provide a DR service that delivers RPO’s typically as low as 15 seconds, over relatively slow connections is fantastic. And as the replication is performed at the hypervisor level we can protect any virtual (VMware or Hyper-V) environment without worry about the storage layer. The automation element is also a crucial element as it ensures we do not have to spend lots of man hours in the event of a DR failover request, as well as streamlining the ability to test the DR environment without needing any down-time of the production environment. And finally add in the ability to automatically reverse replication once you have failed over allowing you to re-seed the production site and failback with minimal downtime and you have a great all-round DR solution.

Before we took on Zerto our DRaaS offering was based on snapshot based backup’s with an automated restore process to our cloud hypervisors. This was a good service but we could only offer RPO’s as low as 1 hour and even then this was subject to caveats specifically around the size of the VM and how quickly we could ship the new data to our cloud platform. In addition, testing was much more cumbersome and meant a much higher number of hours had to be invested in every DR test, ultimately raising our costs. With Zerto in place we are now offering commercially sound services to small and large businesses without the worry of needing to invest in large numbers of staff to manage and perform testing, etc.

Backup capability as it is limited and not as streamlined as it could be. At present Zerto delivers backup protection by making duplicate copies of VM disks to a defined storage location (but this is limited on the schedule and retention). In the latest version 4.5 this has now been extended with the capability to do object level recovery from the replicated VMs, the caveat here is that the retention period is limited to the journal retention (which is a maximum of 14 days). I would like to see a more integrated backup/retention capability in the solution allowing more flexible scheduling and unlimited retention with the capability to easily restore objects using the one Zerto web interface. The backup images should be able to be stored off-site, away from the main replication site, and easily be reintegrated in the main DR platform if needed for VM recovery of an old image.

I've been using it for 18 months. v4.5 for the last four weeks, and prior to that we ran v4.0 since our initial deployment.

When we first deployed Zerto we didn’t understand some of the limitations around the built-in database (it uses SQLite). Whilst this would normally be fine for most small to medium deployments (the database is supported for up to 100 protected VMs and 4 sites), as a cloud provider we needed to have greater scalability. This is provided by using a full deployment of Microsoft SQL, thankfully Zerto have a tool that will migrate the SQLite DB into your Microsoft SQL server so the transfer is pain free, but I would make sure that anyone who is deploying in an environment that may have more than 100 VMs to deploy initially on Microsoft SQL. Another area to be aware of in scalability is not with Zerto itself but the demands it can put on the DR storage environment, you will be replicating all your VM disk writes as well as journaling and potentially adding more demand when testing (as the Zerto continues to replicate even when testing, which is great, but does hammer the storage).

We've had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

In one word, fantastic. When we evaluate a product one of the key areas we look at is the level of technical support we will get from the vendor. Bottom line IT systems have a habit of going wrong (one of the reasons I have had a job for the past 20 years), so once you accept that no system will be error-free, you need to know that if you do need help its available. We have had issues, bugs and questions and in every case we have been supported by the Zerto tech support team.

Our DRaaS platform, prior to Zerto, was an extension of our Asigra Cloud Backup platform. Whilst this worked it could not deliver the low RPOs we now see with Zerto nor the efficiencies we see from Zerto in managing day-to-day tasks on the platform such as validation, failover tests (and on the odd occasions actual live failovers). Our choice with Zerto was based on our own piece of mind, we protect a variety of end-users so never failing them (i.e. never failing to replicate their VMs and know we can spin them up when needed) was crucial, Zerto has delivered this for us.

Our deployment was fairly complex, but then we had to deploy a platform capable of multi-tenant support with complex networking and integration with vCloud Director so that customers could access their DR systems via a secure web interface. If you are deploying a site-to-site solution then deployment is very straightforward. Each site requires a Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) which is deployed upon Windows, this will then integrate with your vCenter servers at each site. From here it’s a few button clicks to deploy the Virtual Replication Appliance/s (VRAs) which are small Linux systems bound to each host that handle the ‘smart’ features of Zerto Replication, linking the site and your off.

Deployment was performed using in-house resources. The most important bit of advice I can offer to anyone considering implementing Zerto is understand your storage requirements at the production site and then decide on what levels of performance are acceptable. If you want to have low RPOs (seconds) then remember that you will be replicating all of your production writes into the DR storage device. And as initially these writes are put into the journal datastore and then read out after the defined retention period and written to the actual storage datastore be careful not to overload your DR SAN. As an example we deploy using separate SANs for journals and customer storage, with larger customers getting dedicated storage designed to accommodate their traffic patterns.

As a Zerto Cloud Service Provider (CSP) our licence model is different to end-users who can purchase the licence on a perpetual basis. For us the ROI was under 6 months, but we already had a large portion of the hypervisor and storage environment needed so were able to keep our costs to a minimum.

Zerto, in my opinion, is one of the best DR products on the market currently, its only flaw (if it can be called that) is that it is limited to virtual environments, specifically VMware & Hyper-V (it does also support replication to AWS if needed). If you are looking to streamline your DR capability and remove risk then speak to Zerto and get them to run you through a demo, what they say the product can do is not sales talk, it really can do it.

Zerto Dashboard

Failover Wizard

Recovery Checkpoints (Journal)

Our main use case for this solution is disaster recovery, migration and app testing.

Zerto helped to reduce downtime. I worked a lot in a consulting capacity and experienced DR situations where XYZ was down or a data center was down. Using Zerto to get them back up and online was a lifesaver.

Zerto reduced the staff involved in data recovery. It's a tool that allows you to do a lot just with one person at the console.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the live migration. 

This solution could be improved by being more cloud agnostic. 

I have been using this solution for eight years.

This is a very stable product. I've never heard anybody complain about its stability. I would say it's probably one of the best out there.

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support for this solution is good and their staff are knowledgeable and able to assist quickly with resolutions. 

I would rate them a nine out of ten. 

Positive

I've used several other products including Site Recovery Manager. Zerto is the easiest to learn. There is much less of a learning curve. Other tools specific to VMware are now trying to emulate what Zerto has done to make processes easier. Zerto was a huge step in making things more simple to manage. The app works really well and integrates with VMware really well. 

The initial setup is straightforward, especially if those setting it up understand the company's infrastructure. The problems are not directly related to Zerto itself. They're always related to how the infrastructure is set up or how the network itself is segmented and having certain people that have control or access and others that don't.

The return on investment is in the ease and functionality of the tool as opposed to actually a gain from using the tool.

There may be less expensive solutions on the market but with Zerto, you get what you pay for. A lot of people don't like to think about the price until it's already happened and then the price is too high because they would be losing either way. It's better to think about it and pay for it upfront than pay for it after the problem.

We previously used and considered Site Recovery Manager.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.