Zerto Reviews

We use the solution mostly for disaster recovery, however, we use it a lot for VM migrations and data center relocations.

The ease of setting up replication, the speed, and the ease with which I can fail over and fail back are all excellent aspects of the solution. 

We've used Zerto for failing over and moving a lot of workloads from one location to another during v-center upgrades, during data center relocations, et cetera. We even had a case where we had a need to move over to our DR data center, however, in the middle of running there, our DR data center started having thermal issues, so we had to bring everything back. Zerto made that super easy.

Previously, we were using SRM. In the case of the thermal event, SRM would probably have taken, I'm guessing, an hour or two to do the failover. With Zerto, we were able to get everything moved over in about 15 minutes, and it was roughly 150 or 200 VMs that we did in that time period. 

The near-synchronous replication works. It's very quick. I like that I can fail something over and not lose any data. That's pretty important. We want to not lose data. As a healthcare organization, losing patient records would be a very bad thing. 

It's important to have DR in the cloud right now. We're looking at leveraging AVS for our DR site for the sake of not having to run our own data center. Leveraging the cloud is super important. It will help us to get away from on-prem and not even have to deal with a co-location facility. The reliability will be important. There is also the impression that there is going to be money savings around that.

It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. Overall, the RPOs have gotten better. Every aspect compared to where we were with SRM or prior to that, Zerto has improved. It's a lot easier to manage Zerto as it is hardware agnostic. It helps get things failed over and protected quickly. Every aspect has improved with Zerto.  

Some of the ability to automate selections and automate VPG creations could be better. We've been building out a lot of new V-centers lately, and new data centers. Whenever we create a VPG, we generally set some very specific settings. If there was a way to set a template or a blueprint, to say that if I'm replicating to a data center from here, these are always going to be my default settings. That would be ideal, instead of having to manually set everything every time. 

There are a few issues we've had with Zerto where it doesn't behave the way we want it to. I'm being told it's by design. Therefore, it's not an issue per se, it's by design. 

I've been using Zerto for three or four years.

I've had no problems with the stability. There have been a few bugs along the way, however, Zerto has been very quick to work through them. 

We have 1500 to 1600 VMs protected with Zerto and most of our DR strategy is being built around Zerto.

I can't speak to scalability. We've been steady-state since we implemented it. It's been protected by the same workloads since then. 

Zerto support has gone downhill recently. When we first started, they were great. However, after the HP acquisition, the quality of support is not as good. The knowledge has dropped and the time to respond is slower. I seem to now get people who ask basic questions that I already answered when I opened the ticket. 

Neutral

Previously, we were using SRM. SRM was a nightmare. Zeerto has been drastically better. 

The pricing is expensive. However, I definitely see the value and my corporation sees the value. 

We did look at Veeam and were using SRM in the past and Zerto seems to be the most full-featured and the easiest to implement. It's also the most powerful overall. Veeam isn't even close to what Zerto can handle right now. 

We're mostly on-prem, however, we've started doing DR into AVS - Azure VMware Service.

I'd rate Zerto eight out of ten.

We use it for disaster recovery. We do disaster recovery in the cloud as well. We also do routine testing of the disaster recovery functionalities.

We do disaster recovery in the cloud. Having DR in the cloud is absolutely fundamental. Backups are great, and disaster recovery is quick. If something is down, with the click of a button, we would be able to spin up multiple assets. Zerto allows us to do that.

We primarily have Azure, but we also have some integration with AWS. We found it pretty seamless. There are a couple of pain points every now and then with setting up policies and getting things to work as expected, but their support is very helpful for any of the cases that we run into. Whether it is running against RTO or having issues with certain VMs and certain workloads, we have been able to work through these issues and get it functioning as expected.

Zerto has been very helpful for RPOs. It definitely keeps us at our target recovery point. It is definitely the most important toolset for us to meet the RPOs.

Zerto definitely helps our engineers sleep better at night because we know that we can meet our RPO. We have an immediate button if we have to do a restore. Sometimes, we look in Zerto first rather than having to dig out of backup. That is probably Zerto's highest value-add.

It does near-synchronous replication. CDP has definitely come a long way. They were the first ones to do it, and they have definitely done it the best in my opinion. Other solutions that are out there are trying to emulate it, but in our stack, Zerto will always be the one on which we rely the most for continuous replication. For production workloads, this continuous replication is absolutely critical. We have a lot of SQL data and things that are constantly changing. It is sometimes a little bit of a struggle for Zerto to keep up with that much change rate, but with the tweaks that we have made, it has definitely been more possible. It is definitely something that is important to us, and for production apps, it is absolutely key. 

There are a lot of features. The UI is straightforward. It makes it very simple to group our resources and understand that our production workloads are covered because we can set them up as granular or as non-granular as we want. If we want to select an entire cluster, we can do that, or we can group it by application, which is the best practice and what we do as an organization.

The biggest pain points we have experienced are related to some of the SQL-intensive workloads just because the VPGs struggle a little bit to keep up. That might be because we are pushing too many transactions. That might be on us, but that would be my main suggestion. There might be a way to tweak the settings. There is an option to exclude scratch disks or temp disks in SQL, and that helps, but we still struggle a little bit with the databases with high transaction volume for the VPGs to keep up. We have done a little bit of work with the monitoring features that they have in the portal to identify whether ZVM or something else is overloaded and then allocate more resources to it, but there can be a little bit more transparency. If there is something they can do along those lines, that would be awesome.

Deployment is an area that can be improved a little bit. Sometimes deploying new ZVMs and things can be a little confusing. Also, with the supportability matrix, there is a little bit of a gray area sometimes as to which version is supported. There is some opportunity there to improve transparency around versioning and what to use moving forward for all workloads.

I have been using Zerto for about five years between multiple organizations.

It is very stable. We have no issues. We do not have to worry that Zerto will go down. We shifted most of our on-prem into Azure, and it works flawlessly.

It is definitely scalable. It just works. We can add more VMs. We can add more ZVMs to scale with the business needs.

We are using it mostly for the production workloads. We have a couple thousand VMs.

I would rate them a nine out of ten. It is hard to get a ten out of ten. There is always more that you can do with support, but they are always very responsive. They helped us through multiple issues with different VPG replications. We have had some issues there, and they were always very good at guidance. They always have a solution and a lot of good documentation as well to reference before opening a case. That is helpful. 

Positive

I have only used Zerto in the past. That is the one I am the most familiar with and comfortable with. I can compare it to other backup tool sets that I have used in the past, but I know Zerto is not exactly a backup solution. 

Its UI is very simple. I always find what I am looking for relatively easily. As they have evolved the web portal, it has only gotten better. The UI is definitely on point today.

I believe we have seen an ROI, but I do not know the exact number. We are definitely seeing a good return from what we have put into the Zerto product. Our business users said that it is very important to them to have disaster recovery and for us to be able to perform quarterly tests with all these different application stacks. We can show them what it is like to bring up a bubble environment and do full testing.

It was a little before I joined the company, so I cannot comment on the solutions they evaluated. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room for improvement. There could be a little bit more transparency around releases and what version to use. They have done some rebranding in the past such as ZRA and ZVM. There is some confusion there sometimes related to some of the internal terminology when you do not work on it every day, but overall, we are very happy with the product. It does what it is intended to do, and as a customer, that is all you can ask for.

I used Zerto in my last company for disaster recovery. It was a hospital, and now, I work for a bank where we use it for both disaster recovery and migration. We are doing a major migration.

Currently, we are doing disaster recovery only on-prem, but down the road, we will also go to the cloud. We are planning to go to Azure, but we do not know what we will actually use at that time.

We can recover a VM at any point. It probably takes five minutes, which is very important for us because if I lose my active node, I will have my production up in a couple of minutes.

We did reduce the migration time. I do not have a number, but it is better than VMware SRM. We are a big VMware shop, and we have now started buying HPE.

In terms of Zerto's effect on our RPO, I do not have the numbers because I am an implementation engineer, but the numbers should be good.

The migration and ease of use are valuable. It is easy to set up and easy to flip. We just need to click on Move. It can Re-IP at the same time. This is something very useful for us. Disaster recovery is also valuable. 

Its user interface is good. I have no complaints. The only complaint is that if I remove a host from a cluster, it does not like that. If I move and put the host in maintenance mode to fix it, and vRA is down, Zerto does not like it. Zerto should figure out that this host has an issue and it went down. Zerto should then let me upload that vRA information to another vRA.

So far, we have not seen any issue. We will know more down the road as we use it more and more, but right now, we are okay.

It is very scalable. That is why we did not go for Veeam. We went for Zerto.

Our environment is very big. I work for a large bank. 

I have not yet called their support. I did not have to call them.

We switched from VMware SRM to Zerto. VMware SRM is good, but if I do not do error-level replication and I do only vSphere replication, it is not good. The vSphere replication is not as good as the Zerto replication. Zerto is faster. It takes less time.

I did not do the implementation, but my team deployed it. Because I have used it before, my guess is that it is not complicated to deploy.

We have seen an ROI. If I do a vSphere replication from vCenter to vCenter, and of course, we can do long-distance vCenter migration these days, it would not be as good as Zerto replication.

There is a lot of confusion with Zerto licensing. They have a migration license and a replication license. They should simplify the licensing process. 

The migration license costs a lot of money, and it is only on a one-time basis. If you use that license, it ties to that VM. I might re-migrate that VM in the next five to ten years. It is another environment, but my license is stuck there. 

The replication license is fine, and I have no issue with its pricing model, but they should simplify the migration license. It should not be tied to a VM. They can reduce the price because a lot of people do not buy it because of the price. A long time ago, Double-Take Software used to do what Zerto is doing now. It is another replication software.

I was not in that group, but they did test Veeam. I also used Veeam in my last job. I am not sure if I am qualified to compare, but Veeam seems to be for a small to medium company, whereas Zerto is an enterprise software.

Overall, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten because we do not yet know everything.

Zerto is part of our disaster recovery plan. We have it set up in our main office and in a remote location in another state. We replicate all of our ERP data over to the replication site utilizing Zerto. In case there's a failure or a ransomware attack, or anything that we need to restore back to a point in time, in real time, Zerto covers those scenarios.

Being able to bring a virtual machine online in a test environment, look at it, make changes and then say, "Okay, we're done," and turn it off again, is pretty helpful for us. It has actually saved us a couple of times.

For example, we had an order that was put in by a customer but the entire order got deleted. There was no history of it and no way of retrieving what was on the order. So we actually spun up our production ERP system on our remote location, utilizing Zerto. We brought it online and restored it to the point of time when we knew the record was there, and made a screenshot of the record with all the line data included. Then we shut it back down. We were able to re-key the order and it worked out great.

With Zerto, our disaster recovery is probably the one piece that we know is reliable and available. The way Zerto works, and the way we are utilizing it as part of our disaster recovery solution, make our disaster recovery plan very easy to explain for us and to our auditors.

In addition, when we need to fail back or move workloads, Zerto decreases the time it takes and the number of people needed. A failback literally takes minutes to do, and one person can do it. We can either put it into production or just say, "Okay, we've got what we need." We'll just end it and go back to our normal production cycle. It's very easy and definitely decreases workload. There are no tapes to dig out or backups to sort through. You just grab the time you want and say, "Hey, put me back into this period and time," and it does it.

Zerto's continuous data protection is unmatched. It's phenomenal.

It's also very easy to use. The menus are self-explanatory. Once you understand the terminology of the product, what the VPGs (Virtual Protected Groups) are, you're able to pretty much do what you want in the product. It's very easy to use.

It took me a little bit of time to get used to Zerto's terminology and to relate it back to how you do a backup traditionally. It was a little different. It took a little while to understand what a VPG is and what it does. That's an area that they could probably improve on a little, making the documentation easier to understand.

I have been using Zerto for two and a half to three years.

The stability of Zerto is outstanding. It runs 24/7 and works as described. If there are any issues or any problems arise, we get notifications from Zerto, but that does not happen often. Usually, if there's an issue, it's related to something we've done, or because we need to increase a file size or job log. Other than that, it works the way it's supposed to.

Zerto covers 10 production machines in our environment, which is not a huge scale. We only have one replication site. We could easily add more replications if we wanted to. Zerto has that flexibility. But for us, a one-to-one replication to our Nashville location works perfectly for us.

I have had to call their technical support and they're very responsive. The issue is always resolved. I give them very high marks for their support.

Positive

We didn't have a solution that does what Zerto does.

The initial setup was very simple, very straightforward. Zerto got online with us when we did the initial configuration and gave us easy guidelines to follow. We were able to have it up and running in less than an hour.

We took what Zerto recommended in their deployment guide. We knew the areas we wanted to cover and what we wanted to improve upon. Based on those things, we were able to come up with a nice, easy plan to follow to get it implemented.

When there's an issue, just one person is involved, but generally speaking, there's not much maintenance on Zerto. Once you get it up and running, it does what it's supposed to do.

We have definitely seen return on our investment in Zerto. First, it's a time-saver. Second, for IT, it gives us peace of mind. We don't have to worry about it. 

One of the ways Zerto is really good in that regard is that you can actually bring your servers online in your test environment and see exactly what something would look like if you restored it. And if you don't want to restore it, you just hit "cancel" and it puts it back the way it was. It's great to be able to do that. The test features they have built into the product mean you can test a scenario like "What if I want to spin this up over here, how would it look?" You can do that.

Licensing Zerto was very simple. They had a product that fit our size and scale. It made it really easy to choose. 

As far as pricing goes again, we're a $150 million dollar company, meaning we're not a huge company but we're not a small one either. Zerto had the right pricing model that fit our budget, and they delivered on it.

Zerto was the leader in the category, and I'd used it in the past with another company, so we just went straight to Zerto. There was no need for a PoC with another product. We knew it would work for us.

My advice about Zerto would be "do it." The product is just that good. What it does is very impressive. And again, it gives you peace of mind, knowing your data is safe and secure and that it's replicating like it's supposed to. That's just a great feeling.

We don't do long-term retention currently due to how our backups are made. We use Zerto for anything less than a one-week window and we can revert back. 

Thankfully, we have not had to use Zerto for ransomware, but it would absolutely be a lifesaver should that scenario come up. Similarly, we haven't had a situation where we had to fully flip over to our DR environment. We have tested it, and it works great. Our recovery time would literally be 20 minutes and we'd be up and running in a brand new location, without missing a single record.

While Zerto hasn't necessarily changed the amount of staff involved in our overall backup and DR management, it has definitely made those tasks very easy. We set it up once and we don't have to worry about it anymore. It runs and does its thing. We don't have to babysit it or watch it or worry about it. It just works. For what we use it for, I don't see an area in which I would say, "Hey, add this feature or make this change." It works as described, right out-of-the-box.

We use the solution to protect our general workloads, migrating VMs to the cloud and protecting VMs in the cloud. Our primary use case is to protect and provide DR.

Zerto has enabled us to mature our DR stance quite a bit in how we protect functions.

The near-synchronous replication works pretty well. Going from RPOs of an hour to five seconds is pretty interesting.

Zerto enables us to do disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center.

Having disaster recovery in the cloud is very important for our organization as we're currently moving our production workloads to the cloud.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in our environment. Our RPOs are getting lower.

The speed of recovery in Zerto is much faster than with SRM.

The on-prem to Azure, migration, and protection aspects are good. Zerto is one of the few tools that work pretty good and at moving between regions or clouds.

The near-synchronous replication is good. 

Automated protection of workloads from one site to another could be improved. For example, with SRM, you can create a VM, and it automatically protects it based on mappings and other factors. Zerto does not do this.

I have been using Zerto for about a year.

It can throw us for a loop at times and it can be challenging to figure out.

We are pretty large-scale. It's been one of the challenges, as it seems pretty simple for smaller scales, but as you get larger, it gets more challenging, which is where the automation piece and lack of that comes in.

Level one and level two are excellent. The development team is a challenge sometimes because they work four days a week. Sometimes, when we have to have a Dev escalation or a severe issue, it takes quite a long time to get a response.

We use SRM and Commvault. Zerto is better than both of them. Commvault is not great at Orchestration DR, and SRM locks you into VMware.

We were early adopters, so the deployment has been challenging, but it's definitely getting more mature and better as we go. 

We bought it from a reseller but we used Zerto services to get it going.

It has reasonable pricing comparable to VMware and others.

Overall, I rate Zerto an eight out of ten because it makes testing easy and provides flexibility between on-premises and various clouds.

We use the solution for running demos for HPE partners and customers, regarding disaster recovery and backup.

Although our primary use case is to show demos to partners and customers, we think it's really valuable.

The most valuable features are disaster recovery and that the RTO takes less than ten seconds. It's a reallypotent tool.

The near-synchronous replication is really good and an advantage for customers. This feature is really important because we can show it to customers and partners, helping recovering from ransomware, and does provide huge value.

You can protect your VMs in the environment. It depends on the network and environment, but the RTO takes around 7-8 seconds. When you compare Zerto to other solutions in the market, it's very powerful. 

Also, the ease of use and speed of recovery are wonderful. 

I'm happy with the solution, but I would like Zerto to support other hypervisors too

And the price could be cheaper, but it is reasonable.

I have been using Zerto for two years.

It's very stable. 

The scalability is really good. 

We have used SRM from VMware and RapidDR from Simplivity. In comparison to those products, Zerto is really simple to use and helpful. 

We are constantly trying new products. Zerto has the lowest RTO, you can recover a lot more quickly than using other solutions. 

The initial setup is very easy.

We did the implementation ourselves. 

Our clients think it's quite expensive but I advise them to consider all of Zerto's features.

You need to start with 25 VMs, which sometimes is too much for SMB clients in some countries. It would be better if they had the option to start with a license for less VMs, like 5 or 10.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten because of the low RTOs, the ease of use, and how helpful it is for clients.

We primarily use Zerto for disaster recovery.

Zerto ensures a smooth transition during a disaster when we need to automatically switch from our primary environment to our recovery one. Zerto offers us disaster recovery in the cloud, which is essential because we don't need to pay upfront costs for infrastructure when doing the DR process. Zerto helps to protect our VM-based applications. 

The solution has also reduced our RPO. The RPO during testing was less than 15 minutes. Zerto reduces the amount of work we need to do because some of the steps are automated. It takes about five to 15 minutes to test. Zerto has decreased the number of staff needed for backup and DR. It only requires one or two. 

The core backup and disaster recovery features are the most valuable. The near-synchronous replication ensures we will be able to keep the business running if something happens. 

There's a mandatory VMware version, so we need to update our VMs in order to access our data. Zerto should work with all VMware versions. 

I rate Zerto nine out of 10 for stability. 

I rate Zerto eight out of 10 for scalability.

I rate Zerto support eight out of 10.

Positive

We are using Zerto and Acronis. 

Our IT team handled the deployment, but I don't think it was complicated. 

Zerto is a little expensive.

I rate Zerto eight out of 10. 

I use Zerto for disaster recovery. 

The time it takes to fail a server over to DR has been great. We've seen a reduction in time spent. We can do it in minutes. Being able to go back to certain snapshots, to failover to another location, and then go back to specific snapshots is quite useful. We can roll back easily. 

The off-site replication is excellent. We have workloads that aren't DR-aware. Being able to replicate it to other data centers is great. We don't have another way to do it, currently. 

The near-synchronous replication is good. You get five-second data points. It's not something we advertise to our customers, the developers, however, we've had instances where we needed to go back two hours, prior to a file being deleted, and it's helped. 

We're protecting our VMs with Zerto. It's positively affected our RPOs. It meets the objective. It's the only way we can have a solution for certain applications where we send an entire application to another data server. 

It's a great product. There are a lot of features that it has that we don't use since we are on prem. We strictly use it for DR between our data centers. There are a lot of cloud plugins that they have that we don't use. Our use case is limited. It does everything we need it to.

I've been using the solution for probably four or five years. 

The stability of Zerto is good. We didn't have any issues. Our biggest challenge was trying to get to the clients and I was waiting on an upgrade path - from Windows to Linux. Now there is an upgrade path. Honestly, that has been the biggest challenge we've had for five years. 

The scalability of Zerto is good. You can easily protect other clusters and VRAs. It's very flexible.

Our current environment has 45 VRAs in each cluster. We have two replica pairs, two sites that mirror each other. 

In total, we have 70 ESX hosts.

Technical support is great. They've shown us many things about the manager that we didn't know about. Every time I call, I take notes. They are very knowledgeable and the knowledge-based articles on the site are also helpful. Even if I thought something was broken, they've always managed to fix it. 

Positive

We used to use VMware's SRM. With SRM, for us, it was overly complex. We used an array-based replication with SRM. We had issues where the storage team would go to do work on the array and they would fail the machine over and it wouldn't be right. We would have outages. Every time we did a failover it was a process and we would be missing rules.

This is not array-based and we can test our failover in a sandbox without taking the system down. 

The initial deployment was easy. We deployed VRAs to the host from the manager. It works very well. The amount of VRAs you have to deploy and the amount of time it takes is minimal. It took us about an hour. 

I can't speak to if the company has witnessed any ROI. 

I don't follow the licensing. It was bought for us and we use it. 

We evaluated SRM and a few others. I can't remember which ones we tested. We've been on Zerto since version six. 

The selling point for us, coming from SRM, is that SRM was tied to vCenter. We had to pay attention to versions and there were a lot of ways you had to make sure the versions were correct and it was overly complex for what we needed. We simply needed to replicate a virtual machine and that was it. Zerto stood out as it was easy.

I'd recommend the solution to others. I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.