Zerto Reviews

We primarily use this solution for disaster recovery. The initial sync was from Pure to Compellent, and DR with disparate storage was great. Once we identified our critical servers, vetted the Live and Test Failover, and got the necessary configuration at our DR site, we are now able to perform tests in a safe bubble.

This solution is an integral part of our DR plan. The data and servers we needed are protected in a group as I need them. Changing or adding servers is easy and fast. The ability to protect resources that are in hurricane zones has been fantastic. Being able to safely perform DR testing remotely has enabled us to meet DR goals that were put in place. The first DR test with everyone in a room was fun, as everyone who hadn't seen it was amazed at how fast a server can come online.

The replication has been outstanding, it was three times as fast as initial Compellent replication. The ability to copy new data and protect new servers without a significant delay in getting the data is very valuable.

The ability to perform DR testing to ensure data integrity is critical.

The mobile app is great.

Increased granularity in how long to keep the journal would be nice, currently you can only do hourly up to 1 day, after that it is only daily.  The ability to test failover for a single VM in a VPG would be beneficial for testing purposes.  Currently alerts come from both replication managers at times, creating a lot of alerts; reducing those would be good.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

Setup is really easy and quick. Make sure that you have your desired networking for replication and testing in place.

You are getting what you pay for, as this is a solution that requires minimal management after it is configured.

We did not evaluate other options that are worth noting.

EMC was too expensive and everything else was tied to the storage vendor.

It has been a great purchase, and we have no regrets.

Not much can be improved in this solution as it has performed to what we had hoped and has the features we currently desire.

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.

I am a part of the disaster recovery team. We manage Zerto for our customers. We perform business-as-usual tasks such as installing Zerto or implementing Zerto for VMware infrastructure and if needed, for cloud infrastructure. We manage Zerto on a daily basis. We create the VPG, add virtual machines to the replication, operate Zerto to perform maintenance, and so on.

We use Zerto for live replication. It is real-time replication that takes around a couple of seconds. We don't use long-term retention or backup. We perform failover tests and live failovers as well.

Our customers are mostly satisfied with RPO, which only takes a couple of seconds. It does not cause big problems. It usually takes a couple of seconds. You do not have to perform any specific actions to keep it running because it mostly runs by itself and even resolves some of the issues itself. Zerto is very much related to VMware infrastructure. If VMware infrastructure is running fine, then Zerto runs fine as well. Zerto itself does not cause any problems.

I cannot compare it with others because we are mostly using Zerto, but we are very satisfied with it because within a couple of minutes, or even seconds, we are able to recover a VM or multiple VMs. Other recovery systems might work similarly.

Its ease of use is valuable. You do not have to do much to install Zerto or implement Zerto on the infrastructure. It is not very complicated. It does not have large requirements. There are mostly network requirements. It is required to be connected to two sites or more, and then you just install Zerto Virtual Manager. You also install virtual replicators on the ESXi host and perform replication of VMs.

I do not have any specific ideas right now. I know they moved to the appliance version with Zerto 10, but I do not have much experience with that because we are still using Zerto 9.5 and 9.7. The appliance will be faster and more secure. It will be good.

I do not need any additional features. The replication is real-time. We are very satisfied that this is happening all the time. We do not have to touch anything. When we implement it in a proper way, everything works fine. We just let it be.

I have been using Zerto for around two years as an engineer.

If the VMware infrastructure works fine, then Zerto works fine. I have only observed a couple of issues, but usually, Zerto Virtual Manager and VRAs work fine. They are not very problematic.

I do not have much experience with scalability. One of the customers has eight vCenter servers, and each one of them has Zerto implemented. They are all connected with each other, so sometimes replication goes to a couple of vCenters. Another customer has only two vCenters but with a large number of ESXi hosts in VMs. There are around 500 VMs that we have in production for one customer. 

I have contacted their support multiple times. They are quick to respond. They are happy to help. They are happy to connect by Zoom to have a session to share the screen. I am satisfied with them so far. I would rate them an eight out of ten because not every response is as we expect. They do resolve the issue, but sometimes customers have unusual questions, and they are not able to say how exactly to fix that or how to do something, but overall, it has been very good.

Positive

I have implemented Zerto from scratch on the infrastructure. In most cases, I am not configuring the network. There are other engineers to do that, but if the network is working and I have all the information I need, then installing Zerto Virtual Manager and Virtual Replication Appliances (VRAs) is very smooth and simple.

If everything is configured as it is supposed to be, it does not take long. It also depends on whether you need to deploy a Windows VM or appliance. If you need to deploy an appliance, it will take a little more time. Deploying a VM and installing Zerto Virtual Manager and VRAs takes a couple of hours.

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. There is always room to improve, but I do not have anything specific that can be improved.

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.

Our use case is disaster recovery or failover. It makes it a lot easier for us to actually test DR because of some of the coordination and orchestration that are a part of Zerto. However, our use case is strictly DR, making sure that we have the right RPOs, and Zerto does a good job of handling that.

Zerto improved a lot of the processes that we do for disaster recovery. It makes it a lot easier when we talk to our upper management and letting them know that we have a way of getting data from one data center over to another data center without a whole lot of friction.

I like that the failover is simple and that it's a stable platform. It makes it easy for us to do failovers in the event that we have an issue. It also makes it easier to do tests of failovers prior to actually doing a real failover. This means that we can pull things back or commit them over on the other side. Zerto streamlines the process instead of having to have a whole team of people who are dedicated to disaster recovery.

When you compare the ease of use of Zerto versus that of SRM, it's a night-and-day difference. SRM was very kludgy to set up when we implemented it. Zerto was a lot more streamlined from that perspective. SRM wasn't very stable for us, sometimes it would work, and sometimes it wouldn't. With Zerto, we rarely have any issues that can't be fixed with a phone call. It doesn't require a full rebuild, and the upgrades are simpler. It's just a better solution all around.

We don't have a whole lot of downtime, to begin with. When we've had issues, Zerto has allowed us to move the workloads quicker. I would say from a configuration perspective, Zerto saved us quite a bit of time over SRM. Zerto is a set-it-and-forget-it type of tool. We get into it only when we need to.

When you compare the speed of recovery with Zerto versus the speed of recovery with other disaster recovery solutions its fairly quick. We can failover a workload from our headquarters to our DR facility and have it up and running in 10 or 15 minutes, which is pretty good. A five-minute migration is also a nice feature.

Zerto hasn't reduced the staff involved in a data recovery situation because we're a fairly thin IT assistance team. However, with Zerto, we don't have to plan ahead for additional resources just for an eventual or potential failover.

When we do regular disaster recoveries, where we do a full failover and test in our DR facility for a couple of days, Zerto makes it a lot easier to move it from one place to another and make the VM agnostic to the datacenter.

We're an NSX-T shop, and if I could get an NSX-T integration where it could manage the networks a little tighter, that would be an improvement.

The other improvement is working with storage vendors, like Pure Storage for the synchronization of the data similar to what SRM does. Using Zerto for the orchestration, and the hardware vendor for the replication would be beneficial.

I have been using Zerto for about three years.

The stability is very good. It's rare that we have a complete outage. Sometimes, we have a VPG that doesn't replicate correctly, but a call to tech support gets it resolved.

Right now, we have about 120 VMs that are being replicated, and we have an eight-second RPO. I consider that good performance for our workloads. I know we could scale out easily using our current configuration.

Zerto's technical support is very strong. When we have an issue, it gets resolved quickly. We have never had an issue with Zerto's support.

We've had good experiences with all of the engineers that we've worked with, so on a scale from one to ten, I would rate them at nine.

Positive

We used SRM previously, and it wasn't very good. We ended up having to rebuild it a few times.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. Everything made sense, and after a couple of days, we were up and running.

We had an engineer from Zerto help us with the implementation.

I think the cost is reasonable for VM licensing. It's not outside the scope of an enterprise product.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Zerto at nine.

I primarily use it for disaster recovery backup. Also, whenever we need to move things between our different environments, e.g., moving it to different vCenters and Azure, that is primarily done through Zerto

We are in the process of doing a disaster recovery test soon, and Zerto is at the forefront of that. Zerto is really helping out with this. The bigwigs, who don't know anything about technology, come to us and then we explain Zerto to them. Whenever we simulate failures, Zerto has been able to seamlessly and instantly recover. This really gives our team big brownie points.

The most valuable feature is Instant Recovery. Especially when a server needs to be moved over in a crisis situation, Zerto has been there to help me out in a pinch. It is really fast and responsive. It is always there when you need it most.

It is great for reliability. 

I have had problems with vRAs. When I am trying to restart a host, sometimes the vRAs will hang. I would like it if they wouldn't migrate off or shut themselves down, then I have to manually work with it a lot of the time.

I have been at the company for about six months and using Zerto the whole time.

It is pretty stable. The only problem I have is with the vRAs sometimes freezing up. Other than that, it has been pretty stable and reliable. I feel like we can count on it.

It is very scalable. I feel comfortable with it. if we needed to expand in an instant we could.

I have only used our customer support for upgrades, but they have been great and helpful. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

If I have networking issues on one vCenter, then I can just Zerto it over to another vCenter. This instantly fixes the problem, saving us time and money. In one case, our phone system was down because we were having a network issue at one of the vCenters. So, I just moved the machine over to the other vCenter through Zerto. It came back online, bringing us back up.

It is way faster than just manually moving VMDKs, etc. It saves hours of time and a significant amount of money.

I can compare Zerto to Rubrik's instant VM recovery from our backups. Zerto is faster. Since Zerto is instant, it is always watching while Rubrik has to take time and restore everything.

The solution is really good. I am super happy with Zerto.

I would rate Zerto as 10 out of 10. They are great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I haven't used the technical support very much.

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

It didn't seem that difficult to set up. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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