Zerto Reviews

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We may possibly increase usage over time.

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

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

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

The initial setup was very straightforward and easy.

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

Deployment took around a day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disaster Recovery and quick file recovery.  We have used Zerto to recover from Ransomware three times.  Between the attacks we have recovered over 2 million files.  We have never paid a ransome.  Our users were only affected just under two hours with the attacks, majority of the time is actually figuring out in the office which pc actually had the crypto locker program running.

Zerto was able to use an EMC PROD SAN, and a HP DR SAN with no issues or compatibility problems which allowed us to avoid buying expensive hardware for a DR site.

Zerto has allowed us to feel comfortable our data is being replicated, and the data is not corrupted.

Zerto is packed full of useful features. The main feature is easy to manage, you will not need to be in Zerto day to day as it runs flawless.

Zerto has a plugin to integrate seamlessly into VMware VSphere tab.

I would highlight is the fact Zerto was used to migrate all of our VMs from one data center to another data center (two different physical locations) when we upgraded to new hardware. The migration was a breeze.

My second valuable feature is being able to click just a few points in the program to initiate a test vm recovery at our DR location. After testing, all test VMs are deleted along with the data. This is automated, you do not need to interact with deleting VMs.

In Zerto depending on your hardware and internet connection between your production site and DR site you can expect an RPO of 15 seconds.

As of the summer 2016, Zerto just created an extremely fast way to recover files from their journal. Instead of going to our long term backup program and taking a half hour or longer to find a file, Zerto is getting me the file in 4min. This is making my life easier and keeping users happy.

I would like to see Zerto come up with an emergency line for support. Support does get back to you quickly, but when your heart is racing because something happened the calmness of a pro on the other end would be helpful. The reports also need TLC, as I do not really find them helpful.

With these two minor negatives the product and support are great and they get the job done. I am an extremely happy Zerto supporter.

The only issue with stability was when I caused the issue by changing VM settings in the DR site. This was a great test for support, they took care of the issue quickly and got me back up and running.

I consistently see 8-18 seconds RPO. We test DR by adding a file to a server, then 1minute later launching the test failover to a site that is 6 hours (drive time) away. The file will be there in the DR bubble.

We added new VMs with no issues, the only issue to keep in mind is the more VMs you add, the more storage your DR needs.

Customer Service:

Outstanding! Pre-sale we had someone with Zerto actually come to our office and make sure this was the right choice for us. After we went live we had a few calls (initiated by Zerto) making sure we were happy and everything was running smooth. We still get periodic emails checking on us. I have not seen that with other companies.

On the Zerto team, Jennifer and Ciana helping us in our times of need.

Technical Support:

AWESOME!

Tech Support is all initiated by email, but then Zerto will call you if needed. This avoids phone cues. The person I talked to the two times I called in were awesome, they were very knowledgeable. Even though I caused one of the issues that needed fixed by support, they did not treat me with any disrespect even though I caused the issue. The tech did explain how to correctly do the tasks.

We had a very experienced consultant set us up.

My advice for someone thinking about Zerto is to do the trial run that Zerto offers, you will be impressed. If you are looking to get RPO's of 30seconds or less, Zerto can do it. I typically see 8-18 seconds RPO. Needless to say this depends greatly on your WAN link.

I highly recommend going to Boston in 2017 and meeting the staff at Zertocon!