Zerto Reviews

We use Zerto for backups and DR; we back up to a StoreOnce unit and then offsite. We have over 11 servers, including three Oracle servers, one Oracle database, and an Active Directory. 

Before Zerto, we used another solution that caused database crashes and did not offer certainty regarding disaster recovery. Zerto is more configurable and stable.

A DR site reduces downtime, especially with full VM backup and online synchronization. Zerto accomplishes this without affecting network efficiency, as synchronization occurs at specific intervals.

Zerto's ease of use is outstanding; it's easy to set up and has a clear interface and menus. The reporting, analytics, and online monitoring are also excellent.  

Compared to other solutions, the speed of recovery with Zerto is faster. Our last backup solution, Data Protector, was very slow, but Zerto is rapid even in file retrieval. 

The solution helped reduce our organization's DR testing; it's hard to say precisely how much, but Zerto does faster DR testing than other products.

Improvements in stability would be welcome; there are some software bugs that can affect RPOs. We want more of a guarantee that we won't lose any of our backups, even in the event of a disaster. 

The platform measures the right speed of storage devices and gives an alert on the VPG if there is latency, but the nature of the alert suggests the solution isn't meeting the SLA. However, this shouldn't affect the health status of the backup. It should provide an express report that we should enhance our hardware rather than express latency as a threat to the backup capability.

We've been using the solution for two years. 

The stability is acceptable, we experienced an issue once, but the backup time is speedy.

The solution's architecture supports business owners to expand their disaster recovery capabilities as their infrastructure grows. Additionally, Zerto's ability to integrate with various cloud platforms and on-premises environments further enhances its scalability, offering a flexible and robust solution for organizations with evolving needs.

Customer support is one of Zerto's best aspects; the support is excellent, and we can quickly get through to them. I rate them ten out of ten. The support staff are very kind and always solve a problem. I feel secure knowing I have access to such good support.

Positive

We previously used Micro Focus Data Protector and Veeam Backup & Replication. Zerto is easier to use and more straightforward to configure. 

Zerto replaced our legacy backup solution, Data Protector. This not only saved on the cost of the old product but also provided more stability and security to our company. We now have a new backup methodology, and it's a significant upgrade.  

I carried out the initial setup with support from Zerto, which was very straightforward.

The only requirement for maintenance is monitoring the solution and updating versions.

I have 20 years of experience in IT, so I was well-positioned to carry out the deployment myself, with the assistance of Zerto support.

We have seen an ROI with Zerto. 

The pricing is slightly above average, but the immediate and comprehensive support makes the price acceptable.

We evaluated many other options but found Zerto the best, especially for our HPE environment. It's the most stable and straightforward tool, and even those with limited experience can operate it.

I rate the solution eight out of ten. 

I strongly recommend Zerto; I've tried many other solutions, but it's the most stable.

We use the product to help protect VMs in our environment, and regarding RPOs, I carry out the test for them every six months, and it's working correctly.

I advise those evaluating the solution to use it, especially in an HPE environment, as it's fully compatible and easy to manage. There is no requirement for special drivers or configurations.

I use Zerto for disaster recovery and data protection.

It is very easy and user-friendly. You do not need too much knowledge about it before you navigate around it. It is not complex. It is easy for users to use.

We can see its benefits from time to time. Every time we use it, we keep seeing the benefits of Zerto.

We have seen a positive effect on our RTOs and RPOs. We will keep using Zerto. We do not have any plan to change the brand.

Zerto helps me save time. It helps do things slightly faster. 

Zerto has helped me with my time management. It helps me save time. It makes my work easier. It is easy to navigate through.

I find it to be the best. It has had a positive effect on everything I do in my daily activity.

Zerto is easy to use and user-friendly. It is not complex, so I find it easy to use. I do not need to have much knowledge about it before using it.

Its price should be improved.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

I have had a crash once or twice.

I feel it is very good because it supports virtual machines.

I have not contacted their support.

I have not used any other solution. Zerto is the first one.

It was easy. I have not tried any other product, so I cannot compare it with others. This was my first time using Zerto, and I found it to be easy.

It did not take much of my time. It probably took two to three days, but I am not sure because it has been three years.

I had a little assistance with the deployment. It was not just me. We had three people involved in its deployment.

It needs to be maintained. You need to check whether any user or anything else requires attention.

They should adjust the pricing because I feel its price is too much. If they reduce the price, there will be more users and customers.

If you have not deployed it before, you should seek assistance before the deployment.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten.

We use Zerto for offsite disaster recovery. We have over 70 VM servers, several of which are our mission-critical servers that are replicated to our VMware hosts at an offsite location. 

We also replicate our Citrix environment and Disaster Recovery Zen App servers with Zerto to our offsite location as well. Most of our servers are Windows-based operating systems. However, this doesn't matter because we are replicating the VM servers. Further down the line, we may invoke extended retention for some of our more important servers.  

It gives us peace of mind that our data, servers, and environment are protected. We can easily restore VMs quickly and have confidence that the replicated data will be current. 

We are able to show proof in tests, reports, and live data to our owners, showing that our most sensitive data and servers are being replicated to an offsite facility, and we can restore it in case of a natural disaster or from our system being compromised by ransomware. 

Our IT staff can easily navigate through Zerto and test failover, see if there are issues with replications, and create offline copies of the data. 

Being able to test our VPGs and prove that our disaster recovery setup is in place and functional. 

Our business owners can be assured that our data is protected, and in case a serious problem occurs, they know that we will be able to recover easily. 

Zerto is fast to restore our mission-critical servers when needed. We also use Zerto to make copies of our VM servers for our offsite Citrix Zen App Servers. Zerto has helped simplify the process of disaster recovery setup and made the tasks more efficient for our IT Staff.

Zerto could add text alerts if there are critical problems and alerts if changes affect our replication. We do receive emails, and they will alert us to issues that we are having with VPG SLAs. 

I don't have any complaints about Zerto, and I hope they continue to develop new features. If they had classes on using Zerto, that would help with onboarding new IT staff. They may already have them, and I am not aware that they do. Overall, Zerto works out great, and they do a good job. 

I've used the solution for five years.

Currently, our use case is to create a replicated system. We have no access to the internal VMs. We can manage the VMs up to a point, but we cannot get inside to do any kind of corrective actions to the servers themselves. We had no backup solution in place, so we needed to get something there. That is what we are using it for. It is replicating out to Azure. This way we have some place in case the ones on-site get compromised or have issues.

We are moving to a new data center. There are several VMs that we have to move over there that have RDM disks or SQL clusters. Those are the hardest things to move at this point in time, but now that I have the setup and it is ready to go, all we have to do is just flip the switch and get everything over where they are supposed to be. It is going to be a lifesaver for me. It will save me a whole lot of time in putting things back together.

Its initial setup can be better. It looks easy, but if you do not have things in the right place, it is not as easy as it looks. Some of the instructions were not clear. They were a little bit confusing. For example, while setting up SSH initially, it was a little bit unclear if I needed to use a regular credential or some other credential. This was one of the things that was a little fuzzy, and we had to get somebody else involved to help us out.

I have been using Zerto for about a year.

It seems to be pretty stable provided our network stays up and the firewalls do not go down.

I have not had to scale it yet, but we are planning to replicate an environment of roughly a thousand machines.

I would rate their support an eight out of ten because it took a while for the communications back and forth to get it set up. We could not always get together at the same time. We would also run into an issue, and we had to go to development or somebody else to figure out what was going on with it. We would then wait for that response. There were a lot of issues that we had that required a lot of back and forth.

Positive

We did have SRM in place for a little while for about 75 machines. Most of the machines that were being replicated with SRM went away when we had a dissolution with another part of our facilities, so we pulled that out and stopped using it. We then went to Zerto about that same time. 

We are not using it for a full DR. We have another solution in place for doing the DR work. Zerto, at this point, is primarily for replication. 

We are also not using Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. We are using another solution for that.

It was a little rough, but it was not terrible. When we were setting this up, I was working with several machines that were 30 or 40 terabytes in size. Moving that data out to that other location was a long, slow, and ongoing process. There were several times when we had to reach out to their support to try and figure out what was going on. We had to make some adjustments to how they were configured, but that was the biggest challenge we had with that the whole time.

It is slow initially, but once you get it all up there, it is not so bad. It took days to get that data moved. Once it got up or synced, it was down to seven or eight minutes, but it took days to get everything up there to begin with. It took about a week from start to finish to have it fully deployed.

We worked with a Zerto rep. They said that this is what we need, and we got everything in place, but then as we were trying to deploy it, we had issues. We had to pull in support to help us straighten out what we were having problems with. They have been pretty good. Fortunately, I have not had to call them much. Once we got it set up, it was fairly easy to figure out, but doing that initial configuration was a little difficult.

We have not yet seen an ROI. We are going to be moving to a new environment and a new data center. I am sure I would see a big return on investment at that point.

I did not evaluate other options, but there were some higher-up managers who were involved in those conversations. They had neglected to involve the guy who was going to manage it. I heard that they evaluated Veeam, an IBM solution, and Zerto.

I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten only because I have not used it a lot. When we move to the new environment, I am sure I will use it a lot.

We offer Zerto to our application owners and system owners as a DR solution for them. It's part of our service offering from the VMware side because we do the infrastructure for them. We help orchestrate and set it up for them at the back end.

We also use Zerto to remove RDMs from the environment and help manage our storage. If we need to relocate the storage, we use Zerto, especially when going from multiple vCenters or multiple clusters. It's very convenient.

We can completely replicate a server so that when an issue arises we can be up and running with no downtime. Also, if we're doing a planned DR exercise, it works really well. It can be set up in advance so that there's zero downtime.

Using Zerto to get off of old storage has been more convenient than using VMotion.

The replication for DR is really good, and the test failover within the application is really solid, along with the ability to manipulate RDMs or remove them.

We are required to do DR testing for almost every application every two years. Zerto made it more convenient and significantly faster for us. Our job is a nice little 15 to 20 minute stint that anybody can do within our organization. I don't need a full-on engineer. I can have an operations person handle it.

Zerto has really great online training, and they gamified their training pretty well too.

When you compare Zerto's ease of use with that of SRM and Veritas, Zerto is really easy, especially when you're doing a DR exercise or a failover. It has evolved and is now even easier. With every iteration, they make the verbiage clearer, and people just gravitate to it. I can have someone from the operations team help with DR when Singapore's doing a DR exercise, for example. This helps a lot as a company with a global presence. The other solutions require a little bit more understanding of the technology. They are not as forgiving if you make a mistake.

The speed of recovery with Zerto is faster than that with SRM. Much more engineering management needs to go on after the fact with SRM.

Without Zerto, in the event of downtime, it could take hours to get back up and running. Some VMs could take eight to ten hours just to get to a point where they could accept a restore from a backup solution, if that solution is even available.

Zerto does a really good job with their packeting on the networking side, and I've never had a site experience an impact because Zerto was running a replication.

The only thing I really don't like about Zerto is that the ZVM has to be a Windows server. I can spin up any OBA template whenever I want to, but if it has an OS that's tied to it, then I have to involve the OS team from my company. That drives me crazy.

I've been using this solution for five years.

It's exceptionally reliable. I'd give it a ten out of ten. Any complication we've had has usually resulted from the Windows team patching that server or some other behavior.

Zerto scales really well. It scales out really wide, and you can tie it all into your primary site. You don't need central management.

We have around 900 hosts across the world globally. We have a little over 10,000 VMs and have mixed usage with lots of databases, applications, and web-based applications. We have about 27 primary vCenters and seven manufacturing vCenters.

Zerto's technical support takes really good advantage of the community. When you put in a service ticket, they redirect you to a message blog or message group. Then, you can use that to also vet what other people are saying, and you can use that as a great resource.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate technical support at ten.

Positive

We used SRM before we switched to Zerto, and Zerto is very cost-effective.

Zerto is very straightforward to set up. The only drawback is having to have the Window server.

After the Windows server is deployed, it takes less than an hour to deploy the solution.

Zerto does exactly what it says it's going to do. I don't have to go back and babysit it. If something happens, it alerts me. I don't have to sit there and add hours of babysitting or monitoring. I can be doing other tasks. That is our ROI.

Zerto is very cost-effective. We get really great value for the cost of the service.

We looked at Veritas.

I'd give Zerto a good look. Put it through its paces. Look at how you're already offering a DR exercise and how complicated it is in your life. If you're looking at a run book for a DR exercise and your part is two or three paragraphs, Zerto can make it one paragraph.

I would strongly recommend Zerto to make it a little easier and would rate it a ten on a scale from one to ten.

We primarily use it for disaster recovery.

I like the less than one-minute RPO, the ability to IP customize during failovers, and the cloning feature that I can use to clone VMs over at the target location. As part of the automation failover, if we need to change an IP when it fails over to the other data center, Zerto will handle that; there's no need for manual intervention. As far as the cloning, we use that to do quick testing of a VM in the remote data center for lift-and-shift processors.

In terms of ease of use, Zerto is better than SRM now because you can do automated VM protection. As long as you set it up, enable it, put the tags on the VMs, and have the template VPG created, it works. With SRM, we use array-based replication, so anytime a VM goes on a replicated data store and that replicated data store is in a protection group in SRM, it's automatically protected. So there's no intervention needed to protect that VM. Initially, the fact that I had to manually create the VPGs when a new VM came in was a con for me with Zerto when I was comparing it to SRM, but now, I'm happy with Zerto's automated VM protection. We currently use both Zerto and SRM in tandem.

If I had to manually create the VPGs, it could take thousands of minutes.

As far as the speed of recovery, Zerto is faster than SRM because, with SRM, we use array-based replication. This means that we have to shut down the machine, detach the data store, and attach it to the other side. All of this takes time. In Zerto, that doesn't happen because it's continuous, VM-level replication. So, the data is going right over to the other target data store. When we run the recovery on Zerto, we recover a VM in under 10 minutes, so the RTO is less than 10 minutes, as opposed to some SRM plans that can run an hour or two hours.

One issue we've been having with Zerto lately is the ability to go into maintenance mode during vSphere upgrades. It doesn't have the hook into the lifecycle manager of the bump. During vCenter or ESXi upgrades, it causes VCF to fail its pre-checks because the machine doesn't power off and go into maintenance mode. It's been an issue since version 7.5 and it's impacting a basic automation function in vSphere.

I've been using Zerto since 2018.

Zerto is pretty solid in terms of stability.

I'm sure it scales well. In our legacy environment, we only used a 100-pack license, so we only used 60 machines on that license. That was a fairly small footprint. In this new environment, we estimate at least a couple of thousand because we're shifting from SRM to Zerto. I expect it to scale well.

Zerto's technical support is better than that of most vendors that I deal with. I can open up a support ticket and have someone get back to me within a couple of hours. Even with a Severity 3 ticket, someone will email me within a couple of hours. I will rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup process is simple. You get the executable, you stand up a VM, you install it on a VM and open up firewalls, and connect the ZVM to the ZVRA data sites. It's fairly straightforward.

You can deploy Zerto in under two hours, as long as the firewall is in place. When the firewall is in place, everything runs smoothly. Otherwise, it takes a while.

I deployed it myself.

I do think that we've seen a return on investment. We started off with SRM in our legacy environment, and it was probably protecting 90% of the estate. Now, we have a new environment, and Zerto is now protecting 90% of the estate, and SRM is only doing 10% or even less than that.

It's a nice tool, and you should go for it. I don't think you'll be disappointed. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Zerto at ten.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zerto is primarily being used this year.

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

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

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

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

We get our money's worth with Zerto.

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

We use Zerto to replicate data between our on-premises data centers, as well as for replicating data to the cloud. It is used primarily for disaster recovery, and we're not using it very much for backups.

Continuous data replication is the most important feature to us, and we use it for disaster recovery. We have very short RPOs in the event of a data center outage.

With respect to ease of use, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. It is very easy to set up and utilize. The only reason I wouldn't give it a ten is that I would like to see more export capability. Right now, you can export your VPG to a spreadsheet, but you don't have a lot of control over what data goes there. You just get everything and the formatting isn't the best.

When we need to failover or move workloads, Zerto significantly decreases both the time it takes and the number of people involved. It only takes a single person to activate a failover and we can pretty much automate everything else. Instead of a week to recover a major application, we can do it in a day.

Mostly, this solution protects us from data center outages. With ransomware, it gets a little more complicated because depending on what they're doing, you could be replicating the encryption that they placed on you. Then, depending on how large your journal is, how far back you can go and how long the malware has been sitting in your network, it might not save you from a ransomware attack.

That said, it's still a major plus because if you have enough tools in your environment where you can catch the fact that they've been there, then if you've got 14 days, just as an example, in your journal, then you can go back far enough before they place any kind of encryption on your file. But, if you don't have other tools to also help protect you from ransomware, Zerto by itself may not be sufficient.

It's very rare that you have a true disaster where you have to failover a data center. I see Zerto more often being utilized to deal with some sort of database corruption. You can restore your primary site back from before the corruption. We need this Zerto protection, but it happens so rarely that you would actually have a full data center failure that, I can't say that we have had any staff reductions because of it. We have no staff specifically set aside for data recovery.

Beyond your normal path for backup and recovery, and those daily backups and managing that stuff, whether you're using Zerto for your backups or another backup utility in addition to Zerto, it hasn't really changed our staff.

The most valuable feature is the quick RPO for replication, which is our primary use case.

Zerto should add the capability to replicate the same VM to multiple sites.

The export capability should be improved so that it is more customizable in terms of what fields are exported and what the formatting is.

I would like to see the ability for Zerto to handle physical servers, although that is becoming less important to us.

I have been using Zerto with my parent company for the past several months and had been using it at a previous company for two years before that.

Zerto is very stable.

The scalability is generally good.

We're on an older version so this may have changed, but when it comes to cloud DR, they haven't kept us with the Azure capability. For example, Azure used to have an eight terabyte limit on disk drives. Azure now has a 32 terabyte limit, but Zerto still has a limit of eight. 

That said, when it comes to the number of VPGs and the number of instances, that has been sufficient for us. We have 646 VMs and 60 VPGs that are protecting 650 terabytes of data.

We have about four people who are managing it day-to-day. It is a shared role; our server engineering team is responsible for Zerto, and that team has approximately twelve people. They are all capable of utilizing Zerto, depending on their individual responsibilities, but there are probably no more than four people who currently use it on a daily basis.

We don't have one specific person to manage it but instead, we rely on the team. We're in the process of getting them all trained adequately. 

I have been in contact with technical support and I would rate them a seven out of ten. They are similar to a lot of companies, where they're very quick to respond to simple issues that might be in a playbook, yet slow sometimes to get a more complex problem resolved.

This was our first true DR tool. Before that, we were just using backup solutions. The one that we were using most recently was IBM Spectrum Protect.

I have a lot of past experience in my previous company with RecoverPoint, as well as with CloudEndure. CloudEndure was used specifically for cloud DR with AWS.

Zerto is much easier to use than RecoverPoint. Both Zerto and CloudEndure are very easy to use.

The initial setup is pretty easy to do. I was not with this company when they implemented it, so I don't know how long it took them to deploy. However, in my previous company, we initially installed and set it up in a day. We didn't have much trouble.

At first, we only had a couple of small test instances. We started adding things that we needed, over time.

Using Zerto has saved us money by enabling us to do DR in the cloud because we did not have to purchase the infrastructure at the alternate site. It's difficult to approximate how much money we have saved because we never built a DR site for the applications that we now have replicated in the cloud. There has never been an on-premises solution for them.

It is relevant to point out that we're not using it so much for day-to-day backups, but rather, we're using it for continuous data protection for DR and we have not had any disaster, so it's difficult to quantify our return on investment from that perspective.

However, from the perspective of being able to do cloud DR and not having to pay for that infrastructure, and even when it comes to the ease of use when we're going from data center to data center, I think we've got a definite return on our investment in comparison to not having a continuous data protection tool.

There is a difference between what we do and what we would have been doing without a tool like Zerto. In this regard, Zerto is a kind of overhead because hopefully, you're not using it day-to-day in a real disaster. It's more like insurance.

We evaluated RecoverPoint, but Zerto's better integration into vCenter was probably the reason that we chose it.

We do not currently use Zerto for long-term retention, although we are looking at the feature.

I highly recommend Zerto. My advice for anybody who is implementing it is to go through all of the best practice guides and be sure to review whatever database they have in there. This way, they keep themselves efficient.

Also, it is important to keep in mind that it's only at a VPG level that everything is consistent. So, if you have multiple servers and applications that need to be consistent with each other, then, they really should be in the same VPG.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.