Zerto Reviews

We use it for failing over our production servers in the event of an emergency so that we have minimal downtime to continue business operations.

We only use it for failover to on-prem. We do not use it for the cloud.

Zerto was one of the first failover solutions that we implemented in the organization, so the benefits are pretty drastic. It is hard to compare it to any other solution out there because we do not have anything to baseline it on, but it certainly increases the confidence of our end users. We are able to react in the event there is an issue. The fact that we are not waiting for hours to restore operations is something that we find valuable.

We protect VMs in our environment with Zerto. We are very happy with the RPO results.

Its ease of use is most valuable. The online documentation is very clear and helpful. We are able to solve a lot of problems on our own without having to contact support.

We learned that we got a new account representative supporting our account. I found this out today. Apparently, this is something that they kicked off at the beginning of this year, but there has been a failure in communication in letting us know who is the proper channel for us to reach out to if we need assistance. 

While going from the major version 9 to 10, they introduced a new requirement for ECE Licensing, which is not something that we knew about at the time of our last renewal. We purchased it for a couple of years, and as far as we knew, we were in support. It was only when we were in the middle of the upgrade and had set up the entire environment and tried to put it up, it asked for a license key that we did not have. We were told by the support team to reach out to our account manager. She has been a bit slow to respond. It just seemed like lip service. The timing kind of worked out because there was a conference as early as that. They have been trying to fix it and communicating about it. I am hopeful it will be resolved, but I just cannot say for sure how soon or how fast they can remediate it.

I have been using Zerto for about two years.

It is stable.

We have not had any issues increasing the number of VMs being protected as long as we have licenses. We have over 100 VMs.

They are responsive, but when things need to be escalated, it is very unclear who is going to be the person to ensure that things are resolved. I would rate them a six out of ten.

Neutral

I was not involved in its deployment.

It is hard to say, but the value is there. At the end of the day, the benefits of having a failover solution outweigh the cost.

I did not participate in the evaluation of other similar solutions.

Overall, I would rate Zerto an eight out of ten. We are interested in the technical abilities that it offers, but we would like to see an improvement on the support side.

We use Zerto to help our customers migrate and consolidate data centers, especially crossing different geo spaces or long distances.

I haven't used it for downtime, but our customers have it configured for all of their disaster recovery needs.

We work a lot with customers that need disaster recovery and the best possible migration approaches, and Zerto helps them minimize the amount of effort it takes to finish their upgrades or migrations.

Zerto helped reduce our customer's VR testing. It allows them to do disaster recovery tests a lot better and a lot safer without affecting the production environment. Last year I helped two customers migrate over 10,000 servers across the country and across Europe. Automating the process was extremely valuable in those migrations.

The near-zero downtime for migrating from one data center to another has been the most valuable outcome of using Zerto. When you are migrating half a petabyte of data from Texas to Las Vegas, and you're doing that with 3000 servers, you have a limited time to take down the application and bring it up. Our customers like having the downtime minimized.

The biggest improvement would be exporting VPGs and a configuration of VPGs, as well as increasing or improving their IP customization rule set.

I have been using Zerto for seven years.

This is a stable solution. We ran into a minimal amount of bugs and the bugs that we do run into, we have workarounds for.

This solution can definitely scale out very well. I'm looking forward to new improvements in Zerto for Azure. These improvements would definitely make scaling out Zerto much better.

I would rate the support for this solution a ten out of ten. I've called Zerto's support for almost every case that I've needed to. They've been able to resolve the issues in a timely fashion.

Positive

I've used many other options. Zerto is definitely the best of the bunch. Zerto is definitely a lot easier to install than products like Set Recovery Manager, and it includes the replication technology that is agnostic from any storage replication that would be required.

Our customers definitely see a return on investment, especially with time savings, by doing required compliance testing for disaster recovery with a minimal amount of effort.

The pricing is top tier but offers good value. 

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten. 

Our primary use cases were designed around backing up and being able to restore our management plan. This isn't something used for our department users. It is specifically for our infrastructure, things like vCenter, vRealize Operations—all those things that we still have to maintain. We wanted something a little more granular than just a standard backup. We needed to be able to say, "Rollback half an hour or an hour," as opposed to following the backup schedule that the larger backup system provided.

We're using it for migration. Zerto plays a large role in helping us move away from Hyper-V into VMware. We're talking about multiple departments that had to transition their applications and Zerto gave us an opportunity to do it in a much less painful way.

Another key benefit is that our response time has significantly decreased. We're no longer having to rely on the traditional process where you manually execute a backup and hope to God it works okay. And then, you have to run through whatever changes are necessary and cross your fingers that, if you have to restore, it will come back. We don't have that problem with Zerto.

The solution has also helped to reduce downtime for us, absolutely. In most cases, we are able to use Zerto as a momentary backup, run an upgrade or installation, and see whether or not we're going to succeed. We can potentially back it out without anybody knowing about it because it's still within our maintenance window. We never exceed that rather limited time period. That's very helpful. With our existing backup, more likely than not we're rolling into days at a time if something fails. So if our maintenance window was on the weekend, it would roll into the production week and cut into the week by a few days. That would be very problematic.

And the recovery speed is basically as fast as the speed of our pipe, and that's what makes it great. As long as our pipes are fast, we don't have to worry. We can roll in, roll out, or potentially roll back if we have to, within a really small window of time.

In addition, it has definitely reduced the number of operational groups involved in backups. Zerto is not managed by our storage team. It is managed by the team I'm on, which is infrastructure. Because of that, it's all internal to us on the infrastructure team. We don't have to go outside of our team to coordinate with others.

There are several valuable features because of the way we use it. The backup and restore features are definitely indispensable.

There are certain things about the user interface that could be a little bit more user-friendly. But it really depends on the audience. If we are using it as a technical tool, our team is the audience and we are able to utilize it. But if we were to pass this on to, let's say, the department users, that would become a little problematic. I'm wondering whether or not we can actually expand our offering to those department users. That may be a question.

I have been using Zerto for three years.

As long as our infrastructure is stable, it's stable.

All I have to do is add managers out there and it expands. What it boils down to is that my infrastructure has to be able to support it. I have to have space where I can send the backups to. As long as that exists, we're fine.

The customer support is pretty good. The bottom line is that the customer service is responsive, whether we're talking about technical challenges or even licensing challenges. They've been very helpful in both ways.

Positive

We played a little bit with Veeam, but for the most part, we relied on our storage team to provide us with backups. We switched to Zerto because that team wasn't able to deliver in a timely fashion and they weren't able to guarantee restorability.

I wasn't involved in the initial setup. We have an individual who is our infrastructure expert. He took it upon himself to try it out. He told us what he found out when he did that trial and we started playing with it a little bit more and saw how easy it was to use.

I don't want to create upward pressure on their pricing plan, but the pricing is good. It's affordable.

The amount we had to set aside for our existing backup solution, compared to Zerto, was astronomical. The way Zerto works, it is so easy to scale up and out. It's not going to end up creating undue pushback as far as the cost goes.

We evaluated other solutions, with Veeam being one of them.

There's a lot about Veeam that we only just touched the tip of. I can't say with a lot of certainty what specific features Veeam may have. But there's a reason that we only touched the tip of Veeam and jumped over to Zerto.

One of the things that brought us to Zerto was talking to some of the folks that were here, at VMware Explore, years back, about what Zerto did, how it did it, and where it got its origins. That told us it was something that was definitely pretty solid and worth trying. I have to admit that, after trying it, it hasn't disappointed.

Leaving Veeam aside and comparing Zerto with our existing backup functionality, forget it. The two solutions are night and day. There is no comparison whatsoever. There is a lot of overhead with our existing backup feature that we just don't have with Zerto. We definitely have an easier time managing and controlling it. Zerto is definitely easier to use than our existing backup function.

One of the things that I'm finding with Zerto is that we're discovering new uses every day. As we continue to explore what Zerto can do, we haven't even gotten to the point where we say, "We wish it could do X." I'm not quite sure how Zerto interacts with cloud as a target, right now. That's something I need to learn. That's not necessarily a fault of Zerto, it's just me not knowing it yet.

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 didn't have any kind of disaster recovery solution in our environment, whatsoever. We're using it for disaster recovery.

The biggest benefit we get from using Zerto is due to the fact that we have to answer to our gaming authority and prove that we have a DR solution in place. With Zerto we can do it out-of-the-box: do a test restore and actually have documentation that we can provide to our auditors.

Also, before Zerto, we didn't even have a way to fail back or move workloads. Now we do, and we can do so with a few clicks.

When it comes to continuous data protection it does the job. With the RTOs and RPOs, it does exactly that. It's the only one that I've seen that you could call a continuous data protection solution.

And one of the most valuable features, something that I wasn't even anticipating, is the file backups. We weren't even considering Zerto to do restores, but it actually is able to do that. Eventually, we could just use this as our backup solution.

It's easy to use. Once I got it installed and going, it was less than a day until I was already confident about using it. I've done numerous upgrades since then without any third-party support.

The only issue I've ever had is that I wish that Zerto would work more closely with VMware. There have been a few times that Zerto has released an update but it wasn't supported with that version of VMware. I would like them to coordinate their updates with VMware's updates.

I have been using Zerto for going on two years now.

It's rock-solid. I haven't had any issues whatsoever.

From what I've seen, because I have four different vCenters coming into it, I'll be able to scale out as much as I can physically handle on the storage side.

We're currently protecting about 100 terabytes with Zerto and we plan to increase our usage of it.

We're not using Zerto for long-term retention right now, but we do have plans to do so once we get some hardware that we can use for that.

Their tech support gets to the point. They've really been on-task and I haven't had to wait for anything. They've provided me with what I was after or answered any questions that I had.

Positive

I did the initial installation, and it was very straightforward. I've never had a solution that is this intensive and yet this easy to deploy. It took a few hours to deploy.

And in terms of working with Zerto on a day-to-day basis, it's just me.

We haven't calculated an ROI, but just comparing what it's been able to do for us, versus not having a solution, there has been ROI. It has the potential to help reduce downtime. Fortunately, we haven't had any, but it puts something in place to help us if we were to encounter some downtime. We're a casino, so every hour that we're down we lose hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Obviously, I wish it were cheaper and more affordable. But I get what I pay for, so I can't complain.

I looked into the VMware solution, but it was just way too complex. It seemed like it would require a longer deployment and fine-tuning well beyond what it took me to deploy Zerto.

The fact that Zerto provides both backup and DR in one platform wasn't very important at the time. I've seen the benefit now and I'm happy that it does, but it really wasn't a factor in what I was looking for.

The only lesson I would pass on is that when we updated VMware, that version of VMware wasn't supported with the version of Zerto we were running. That could be a "gotcha," so make sure the hypervisor is supported under the Zerto matrix.

Request a trial. It's simple enough to install and configure on your own. My advice would be to see, firsthand, how easy it is.

We use the solution for two different data center sites. Inside the data centers we use VMware virtualization, NSX stretched VLANs and Dell servers. There are many servers, storage, virtualization, and a myriad of operating systems such as Red Hat and Windows Servers. 

We use Zerto to replicate our VMs from one site to the other, where we don't want to have to pay for two licenses of the same thing. We also do this to have high availability or to have the disaster recovery version of a piece of software. It is a benefit to be able to use Zerto to replicate that VM at the second site, and not have to power it on or anything. We know that it's always replicated on the other site. We currently use the solution for disaster recovery only but we are looking at longterm backup retention in the future.

I think it's perfect for providing continuous data protection for us, it is excellent. 

The most valuable feature is how simple it is to implement and how quickly you can get up and running at the second site. The solution is also extremely easy to use, for example, You just log onto the console and you can do a test failover with a few clicks. You can run a failover test for your auditors or your management. Afterwards, you can get a report on how easy it was to failover a specific application and the VMs associated with that application.

In future releases, doing backups of the environment we need to be able to do hot backups of the database. Granular based backups of the OS, versus taking a backup of the entire VMDK. Currently, I don't think we are able to do all that right now. Having an agent-based backup is a benefit because you can back up the OS files, and If you have an agent for the database, you can do a hot backup of the database and restore it. You then would have the ability to do an entire VMDK backup. I don't think that they have the ability to do a hot backup of a database itself via an agent or something similar.

I have been using this solution for four years.

We have a couple hundred people using the solution within the organization. The solution is very stable, you set it up and you can forget it. When we have had issues where we lost the connectivity to a data center, we were easily able to bring up the VMs of a data center that was available using Zerto.

It's very easy to add new hosts and the VRAs get to pull it out automatically. It's very easy to scale, at more sites. We are already increasing and adding more data centers that Zerto can protect for us. We are very pleased with it.

The customer service is stellar. They always answer and they are very helpful. I have had very good relationships with the sales executives and sales engineers. If the team at the technical support cannot get an issue solved, then our pre-sales engineers will get on calls with us and help us sort through problems. They have been great.

We were using SRM, VMware's Site Recovery Manager before we switched to Zerto. We did the switch because we were impressed with the demo that was given to us. Additionally, SRM was very complicated and cumbersome.

The setup was easy and demo replication was simple too. The initial process started by us building out the VMs of the virtual machines, as per their requirements. We deployed the manager, based on all the log information of the vCenter. You then select the data storage and it installs the VRA out on your environment. Once that is done, you put together the virtual protection groups and you build out your replication site, it is very easy.

Our deployment took about a month to go through everything with three different staff members and for the maintenance, we have one technician. Make sure that we grouped everything properly together, based on the network and its functions, and how it should be brought back up etc.

I have saved days and even weeks of working time from using the solution. We are in the process right now of designing a new cloud infrastructure for one of our environments to utilize Zerto to replicate our VMs to our cloud. It is going to be a huge time saver, probably saving us a couple hundred thousand dollars. We've definitely seen some good return on investment with it. Our auditors are impressed by it. 

This solution is far less expensive than SRM and NetBackup. After the standard licencing cost there is an annual support contract, nothing that we were shocked about.

We have also used NetBackup but Zerto was much easier to set up.

When trying to think of improvements I cannot think of anything to critiques at this time because it does behave so amazingly well. I've been involved with other SRM implementations and SRM is very complicated to put together and to configure, whereas Zerto is just so easy out of the box. Overall, the solution probably has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars or maybe millions.

Some of the important lessons we have learned are you need to plan your DR carefully. That is the most important. Also, make sure that your applications are grouped together, be cognizant of the different virtual networks they go into. For example, If you have a web frontend DMZ that goes into one component, where the application and the database are in another place. You need to be careful on what networks you are sending them to at the replication site, be aware of that.

I highly recommend Zerto. I speak about the product all the time. I think that it is priceless what it does for us. 

I rate Zerto a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case is for DR failover. 

The most valuable feature is the rollback feature that captures every couple of minutes. Whenever we have a server that goes down, we can use that to pull it back a couple of minutes before and it's good to go. 

The disaster recovery has been a benefit to us. The ability to capture or move something to another data center is also a really handy feature.

The near-synchronous replication is Zerto's shining feature. We leverage the most out of it. 

On the technical side, we usually need more of the deeper, not near-synchronous replication. We need it more for the back backups but there's always a fire drill. There's always an emergency that needs something that happened five minutes ago to be restored.

We use Zerto to help protect VMs in your environment. 

When setting up Zerto, you have to set up VRAs. I would like to see those not be needed as much. They're a little cumbersome and take up a lot of VM counts.

I have been using Zerto for around four to five years. 

The stability is perfect. 

It feels like scalability is what it's built for. It's seamless. 

I don't usually have to call support. Some of my coworkers are a little more familiar with it, and they have always said that Zerto support is very good.

They're fast, responsive, and willing to look at issues that they're not familiar with.

An interactive chat with knowledgeable staff could be a helpful feature.

Positive

We also looked at VMware. Zerto outperformed it and was more affordable. 

What's nice about Zerto that I don't think we saw with VMware is the ability to use one console for multiple beta centers. It's really nice not having to go into a specific site to come to or from that site. If a site or a whole data center goes down, you can still access it from the other and pull over it if needed. 

We had VRAs that we had to set up. The initial setup was good. The hard part was getting all of the servers into certain groups and then getting the disaster recovery plan for all of those. That was the hard part. Once you have that all setup, initiating those plans is very easy.

We have seen ROI. I'm more on the technical side so I can't give exact metrics. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. It gives me everything I want and everything I would need. Failing over is easy. Disaster recovery is easy. If there was ever an event where I had to roll over a whole data center, I don't really worry about it because Zerto has been there. The setup was probably the hardest part but once you get the hard part done, the rest is easy. 

Sometimes the console is a little hard to understand. Simplifying some of the commands inside of it would help. It's a very minor aspect. Sometimes the endpoint and destinations can get a little confusing and exactly how you want some of the functions to roll over can be a little bit hard to pick up.

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.