Zerto Reviews

Virtual server replication, as well as a level of backup, to our disaster recovery site.

Zerto is the key to our DR strategy. With Zerto, we were able to replicate our virtual servers to a remote DR site across a WAN connection. Zerto has made it possible to have different hardware (processor and storage) at each site.

• Hardware independent: Being able to replicate between two different sets of storage and processors.
• On the fly IP address changes: During a failover to a DR site, Zerto can automatically change the IP address of servers.

I would like them to add a VM host replication option. Being able to replicate host configuration between sites would be a huge benefit. 

Zerto is very stable.

No scalability issues. We have added additional licensing over the years and haven't had any issues.

We have not had to use technical support too much, but we have always found the technicians helpful and knowledgeable. 

We did not previously use another solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward and easy. We were able to start replication within minutes of the initial setup.

Zerto support helped us install and implement it initially. They were very knowledgeable.

We believe the pricing, setup costs, and licensing are easy to understand. The pricing seems very reasonable. 

We did not evaluate other solutions.

For the most part, we are very satisfied with Zerto and its features. 

The Clone Virtual Protection Group does not impact the production virtual protection group which is the most valuable feature.

Failing over the VM without removing/touching the production VM from inventory is also an important feature.

This product has a significant impact on moving the data center across various sites with perfection.

There is a need to allow the source vCenter Inventory to be imported with a single click.

What I meant by one click vCenter is that there is no current option to migrate a vCenter logical cluster as a whole. You can only migrate individual VMs only by adding them into a VPG (Virtual Protection Group). You can failover multiple VMs after adding them into VPG.

I have used this solution for over three years.

There were no stability issues, it is one of the most stable software out there.

There were no scalability issues, it is very simple and easy to deploy/scale.

The technical support is amazing, i.e., if you purchase the premium support. They respond within minutes, it is a very professional technical support team.

I have used a different solution. It was more complex and full of bugs, so that was the main reason that we switched to this product.

The setup was very straightforward. Anyone can do it!

Pricing depends on your future growth. Start small and then scale up.

We looked at another solution namely the VMware SRM solution, it is the recovery point for virtual machines.

Just buy it with eyes closed, no requirements are needed. It works with various VMware versions.

This is the most amazing hypervisor-based replication that I have ever used.

We are using Zerto as a DR solution for our environment as well as for migrations. When we do data center migrations, we use it to move our servers over.

We are only on-prem at the moment. We do not do disaster recovery in the cloud.

In the old days, during data center swaps, it used to take days to move our workload environments over, whereas now, it literally takes an hour for hundreds of servers to migrate. Literally, in under a minute, an app stack can move down and up in a new data center. It is reflected in the uptime support to our customers. Our company is very happy with the product.

Essentially, you just tell it to go and pull the trigger. It is all automatic, so you can sit there and watch the shutdown within vCenter, and then on the remote side, you can see it coming up. You can literally have your environment up and running in under a minute. You just have to prioritize what goes first, and that is a business decision.

Its automation and the ability to replicate and keep an RTO of just seconds is valuable. It is all automatic. Everything is pretty transparent on the backend. It is just point-and-go.

Its near-synchronous replication is amazing. It is a lifesaver. You can see it replicating in real-time in seconds. The overall impact on the network is negligible as well. It is a great tool.

From the technical side, there can be a little bit more PowerShell integration. I know it leverages APIs, but people still use PowerShell. Some people would rather use PowerShell if that is an option.

I have used it across several employers. I probably used it for a total of four or five years before it was bought out by HPE.

It is amazing. You just look at the dashboard, and it is pretty much all green unless you have some replication or journaling issues, but that is not the product's fault. 

Scalability has not been an issue. You deploy it, and it just ramps up and goes. It is all in the background and automatic.

We have about 700 servers and 130 VPGs.

I would rate them a ten out of ten. They are very responsive and technical. Even when there is no issue and you are looking for a root cause or just a question, they are very responsive. They exceed their SLAs.

Positive

My current employer already had it in place. In my previous role, it was evaluated against a few other competitors, and it ended up being a replacement for VMware's Disaster Recovery, which at that time had a lot of issues. Zerto came in and helped us out. We implemented a few new things that Zerto did not have, and I have not looked back.

Zerto is easy to use. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of ease of use.

Currently, we are still on version 9. We have deployed that. Overall, it is very easy once you get the Windows Server. I am excited about the new version 10 coming out that takes away the Windows server requirement.

We did not use an integrator or a reseller, but we are in contact with our engineer from Zerto. I personally know him from a previous job and as a friend as well. If I have questions, I am sure he will help me out.

Uptime for our customers is important. When we are able to do transitions and not impact customers or minimize that impact, that is a financial gain at the end of the day in terms of the satisfaction that customers get, as well as the overall view of the company. As a whole, the management sees that we are doing this stuff in minutes and hours versus days. So, overall, the company is not looking to move away from Zerto anytime soon.

I know it is per server, but I am not fully aware of the price model. I know for our VDI environment, they are looking at something that is on the lower end and that they can use just for migrations and not so much a disaster recovery.

I would rate Zerto a ten out of ten. It scales well. It just works. It is amazingly simple. Everything is pretty much automatic. I cannot remember when I had to open a case because Zerto was not working.

We have Zerto as an emergency backup if we were to lose electricity or compute.

I purchased Zerto because I wanted to get a return to operations and to minimize the downtime.

The return to operations is the most valuable feature because it decreases the amount of time it takes us to recover. 

Zerto is the best of breed when it comes to providing continuous data protection.

It has a number of features rolled together. So when we need to failover, it does it successfully without a lot of stuff that we have to tune underneath the scenes. We use Zerto for the short-term retention of the data.

I would rate its ease of use as an eight out of ten. It has made it a lot easier for us to failover. Usually, in the past, we had to manually go and bring things up and this automates it.

The solution decreases the time it takes and the people we need when we need to fail back or move workloads. It saves around eight hours and one person. We had started off with two to three people.

It could save us time in a data recovery situation due to ransomware or other causes but we haven't used it for that.

We haven't had something where we had to recover data using this product, but I assume it would reduce the number of staff involved in data recovery situations.

It has helped to reduce downtime in testing but we haven't had a serious issue where we had to switch over and use it.

The documentation needs improvement in terms of the setup, getting enough detail, and getting that up to speed.

I have been using Zerto for about a year. 

We found Zerto to be pretty stable.

We haven't had problems with scalability.

We don't really have users. We just have data that we move over which is basically the size of the campus.

We need at least one full-time employee to run it.

It's used for all of our failovers so it's in 100% usage.

I have had a little bit of experience with their technical support. I don't have any issues with them.

The ease of use, compared to other products, is much better. Zerto is all-encompassing. 

We had to work on it for about a week to get it running the way we wanted. It took so long because of the fine-tuning. We could have set it up within three hours or something just as a test to see at work, but not necessarily do everything we wanted to do.

The time it took to sync the data up took a little bit longer.

We'll probably see ROI in around three years. 

The pricing is more expensive, but the functionality is what we wanted.

There are no additional costs to standard licensing.

We also looked at Druva. We liked the flexibility that we get with Zerto. 

You'll be happy with Zerto.

The biggest lesson I have learned from Zerto is to be patient. 

I would rate Zerto a nine out of ten. 

We were able to replace most of VMware SRM with this solution. It allows us to failover individual machines or application clusters with ease. The one thing that it does not do nicely is a full site failover. We have never needed that aspect though (only for testing).

We have leveraged the individual server failovers a number of times, and it has saved us a lot of man hours (doing things such as rebuilding, fighting viruses, or forcing more servers to failover than we wanted). It has been a phenomenal addition, and proved its worth in the pilot phase, when it saved us from having to rebuild a machine that was included in our pilot trial.

Journaling allows us to leverage Zerto's journal for sub-minute recoveries, instead of having to wait for the storage array to replicate. The solution is well worth the money invested.

The full site recovery is not up to SRM standards. Within a VPG, you can do great failover timing as well as ordering and scripting, but if your site contains many VPGs (as mine does), then it is difficult to manage failing over between sites, especially if you are at the site that was impacted.

None. Even the upgrades are speedy and easy. 

None. As long as you have the licenses, it goes smoothly.

I have contacted their vendor support in regards to backup performance of SQL databases. They provided me with adequate instruction and background information to be able to adjust my environment to better suit Zerto's processes. It's been smooth sailing since.

VMware Site Recovery Manager. We changed from this vendor because we hit the 75 license threshold and were forced to consider the conversion to Enterprise. We searched the marketplace and Zerto was a great fit for our needs.

It was straightforward and easy. I was able to install it myself without any help from Zerto.

In-house was all that was necessary. It only required one engineer to work for about two hours to install everything, and then a week to configure and protect the entire environment. This will vary depending on your link to your DR site.

The cost is steep, but once you experience recovering a single server along with its granular restore times, you will see that the cost is justified.

We evaluated Unitrends.

Make sure that you understand the limitations of any software before you dive in. Make sure you document your use cases and have the vendor show you how it can perform those tasks.

Our main use case for this solution is disaster recovery, migration and app testing.

Zerto helped to reduce downtime. I worked a lot in a consulting capacity and experienced DR situations where XYZ was down or a data center was down. Using Zerto to get them back up and online was a lifesaver.

Zerto reduced the staff involved in data recovery. It's a tool that allows you to do a lot just with one person at the console.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the live migration. 

This solution could be improved by being more cloud agnostic. 

I have been using this solution for eight years.

This is a very stable product. I've never heard anybody complain about its stability. I would say it's probably one of the best out there.

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support for this solution is good and their staff are knowledgeable and able to assist quickly with resolutions. 

I would rate them a nine out of ten. 

Positive

I've used several other products including Site Recovery Manager. Zerto is the easiest to learn. There is much less of a learning curve. Other tools specific to VMware are now trying to emulate what Zerto has done to make processes easier. Zerto was a huge step in making things more simple to manage. The app works really well and integrates with VMware really well. 

The initial setup is straightforward, especially if those setting it up understand the company's infrastructure. The problems are not directly related to Zerto itself. They're always related to how the infrastructure is set up or how the network itself is segmented and having certain people that have control or access and others that don't.

The return on investment is in the ease and functionality of the tool as opposed to actually a gain from using the tool.

There may be less expensive solutions on the market but with Zerto, you get what you pay for. A lot of people don't like to think about the price until it's already happened and then the price is too high because they would be losing either way. It's better to think about it and pay for it upfront than pay for it after the problem.

We previously used and considered Site Recovery Manager.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for continuous data protection and cloud onboarding.

The analytic tools are great. 

The external API is something we're using quite a lot. It was upgraded, however, we still haven't upgraded to nine. We were starting to work at six, then seven, then eight, and now we are at eight of five updates. We've been working with this product quite a lot, and they have constantly added a few features. The long-term journal is one feature that is useful in that it allows us to use the product as both CDP and backup. You don't need the backup and disaster recovery tool. That's lowered the overall maintenance and operational costs. The OPEX gets reduced, once you use these two products. 

They have reasonable support. The Zerto university for training staff is very useful. It's very easy to get people on board and to get technicians to work and be familiar with the product. The virtual labs are very useful. You have a sandbox and you can easily play and try the product.

Unlike other products that split the VPG into protection plans and activation plans, they're doing everything within the same location. 

Technical support is good.

It's a very stable solution.

They could improve their online documentation.

From a reliability perspective, the product is around seven. It's less reliable than, others for example. They have one limitation when they have a virtual protection group that does everything.

From the ease of deployment perspective, it requires expertise and time. It's not very easy to do auto-tagging or to run multiple VPG genes at the same time. So, from multi-tenant or multi-complex scenarios such as using Zerto external products, such as firewalls, while their own product is good, it's part of a larger ecosystem, that still has a long way to go.

The triggering of external products could be better. Combining a master runbook and not just a single VPG or splitting the protection group from the activation plan could be better. There will be a protection policy and activation policy as being done in other products. 

Better tagging and better multi-term support are needed. Currently, there is no tenant admin support, only global admin support. They should work at the tenant level instead of the global admin level.

Right now it's an HPE product; they're no longer a startup. We are hoping that being bought by a major company will do good for them and they'll fix what needs to be fixed. There were very good products, to begin with, and HPE should work to make it even better.

We've been using the solution for the last three years at this point. 

The stability of the product is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's reliable and the performance is good.

Technical support has been great. We are happy with the level of support.

We use both on-premises and cloud deployments. In terms of the cloud we are using, we are using Azure. We are using our own Cloud provider; we are using VMware Cloud Director.

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We are happy with its capabilities. They are a very good product, however, they are not perfect just yet.

Our primary use case for Zerto was to enable replication at our DR site for virtual appliances and automation of the failover - failback process. This also gets utilized for recovery at our DR site at different timestamps using the journal history.

This solution is very light, with zero-touch deployment and very enhanced dashboards. 

It has enabled DR protection for virtual appliances with minimal administrator time. This solution also provides a backup option at the DR site without any additional cost of licenses. The Dashboards are very intuitive and can be published to the CIO and CTO. 

We loved the orchestrator, which allows us to specify IPs for our DR site in advance. It also allowed us to pre-configure the boot sequence for a failover test or actual recovery. Backup at the DR site is the icing on the cake. The concept of a journal history and keeping snapshots at intervals of seconds are quite good.

Mobile features are there only for visibility and not to take action. We would love to see the ability to perform actions through mobile apps.

It would be helpful if the reports can be generated periodically, on a schedule.

This solution is very stable.

This is a scalable solution that also supports multiple clouds.

Our earlier solution doesn't have a detailed orchestrator and didn't support appliances.

It is very easy to set-up this solution.

We implemented this solution in-house, without the need for any partner to assist with the set-up.

There is no need to think of ROI as this is a DC-DR solution.

The solution is very cost-effective and very easy to set-up but does not compromise on features. The features are much enhanced compared to any other DC-DR solution.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated VMware Replication & Sanovi.

Overall, this solution is quite enhanced compared to other, similar solutions in the market.

I recommend trying this solution.