Zerto Reviews

We use it to protect VMs. Disaster recovery is our use case. Our compliance requires that we need to simulate a DR exercise every six months if we are protecting a VM. One of the features of Zerto is simulating a disaster recovery exercise in case of failure. We fail back the VM to the DR site, and when the event is over, we fail it back to the production site.

We are using one of the newer releases, but we are still six months behind.

It meets our SLAs for RPOs and RTOs.

• Replication
• Failover and failback for DR

It needs more documentation and automation features. I would like more documentation on designing an environment and network operations. On the automation side, I would like automation to clean up the environment in cases of a failed DR effort. An API interface to perform the DR exercise would also be nice.

I have been using Zerto for seven years.

It is stable. We have had no big problems. 

There have been a few minor upgrades.

It is scalable. From a few hundred to 5,000, it has been pretty easy to scale, not only horizontally, but also vertically.

Zerto is protecting a couple thousand VMs.

The support is very good with quick response times. They are helpful. If you open a session, they will take over and immediately solve your problem. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

We have used SRM and Veeam. 

Zerto is a better product. It has more modern features. It is easy to use. It also has a good interface with command line for scripts.

The initial setup was very straightforward. The solution is easy to implement. You implement it and it starts working out-of-the-box. There is not much configuration required. It takes a couple of hours to have it up and running, protecting you.

We deployed the system ourselves.

We have seen ROI with the RTOs, RPOs, and speed of recovery.

Using Zerto, you can have your VM up and running in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is flip a switch, then you are good to go.

For speed of recovery, Zerto is faster than SRM. SRM takes more time and needs some manual effort. Veeam is pretty good and on par with Zerto.

Do a PoC. You can compare it with other products, like SRM and Veeam. Then, you will see that difference. It is good to have the solution working in a lab. Or, engage Zerto who can assist you in building a lab for it.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

We primarily use Zerto for our critical applications and infrastructure to allow immediate failover at our DR site. We licensed our critical applications and database servers and standard backup the rest. In order to increase uptime, we replicate our entire Active Directory infrastructure as well.

We are able to pass many financial and IT audits because we have a solid system in place with zero RPO/RTO. Furthermore, we can train almost any tech or engineer on the process of flipping to the offsite primary. The button and some minor DNS changes and we are up and running.

The ease of failover and test environments has proven invaluable. It is literally as easy as pushing a button to flip to a contained test environment for staging roll-outs or verifying backup integrity. The upgrade process initially was tedious, making sure every VM host got updated separately, but now it is streamlined and a breeze.

I would like to see better notifications when the sync is off for an extended length of time.  There is nothing worst then going to do an upgrade or test a restore and realizing some of the VPGs need to be fixed because their journal is too small causing bitmap syncing to be off.

Stability is tied to the latency of your offsite DR.

The scalability is directly correlated to your storage and compute. More licensing as you grow is all you need.

The technical support for this solution is great. Every time I have had an issue, I get a real person, quickly, who remotely takes over and repairs the issue.

We were using RecoverPoint by Dell EMC prior to this solution. We switched because it was extremely cumbersome and far from streamlined during failover.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward. It's literally an install button and then next, next, next... 

Zerto assisted us with the deployment.

Have not had to failover often but the ability to test product upgrades has been invaluable.

The cost is not dirt cheap but also is not terrible.

We thought about VMware Orchestration.

If you are looking for an extremely easy solution to implement and is highly effective then this is your baby.

The two key features for AssureStor are hypervisor based replication and the automation for failover, testing and failback.

As a cloud service provider we are always looking at how we can reduce risk for our customers, the ability to provide a DR service that delivers RPO’s typically as low as 15 seconds, over relatively slow connections is fantastic. And as the replication is performed at the hypervisor level we can protect any virtual (VMware or Hyper-V) environment without worry about the storage layer. The automation element is also a crucial element as it ensures we do not have to spend lots of man hours in the event of a DR failover request, as well as streamlining the ability to test the DR environment without needing any down-time of the production environment. And finally add in the ability to automatically reverse replication once you have failed over allowing you to re-seed the production site and failback with minimal downtime and you have a great all-round DR solution.

Before we took on Zerto our DRaaS offering was based on snapshot based backup’s with an automated restore process to our cloud hypervisors. This was a good service but we could only offer RPO’s as low as 1 hour and even then this was subject to caveats specifically around the size of the VM and how quickly we could ship the new data to our cloud platform. In addition, testing was much more cumbersome and meant a much higher number of hours had to be invested in every DR test, ultimately raising our costs. With Zerto in place we are now offering commercially sound services to small and large businesses without the worry of needing to invest in large numbers of staff to manage and perform testing, etc.

Backup capability as it is limited and not as streamlined as it could be. At present Zerto delivers backup protection by making duplicate copies of VM disks to a defined storage location (but this is limited on the schedule and retention). In the latest version 4.5 this has now been extended with the capability to do object level recovery from the replicated VMs, the caveat here is that the retention period is limited to the journal retention (which is a maximum of 14 days). I would like to see a more integrated backup/retention capability in the solution allowing more flexible scheduling and unlimited retention with the capability to easily restore objects using the one Zerto web interface. The backup images should be able to be stored off-site, away from the main replication site, and easily be reintegrated in the main DR platform if needed for VM recovery of an old image.

I've been using it for 18 months. v4.5 for the last four weeks, and prior to that we ran v4.0 since our initial deployment.

When we first deployed Zerto we didn’t understand some of the limitations around the built-in database (it uses SQLite). Whilst this would normally be fine for most small to medium deployments (the database is supported for up to 100 protected VMs and 4 sites), as a cloud provider we needed to have greater scalability. This is provided by using a full deployment of Microsoft SQL, thankfully Zerto have a tool that will migrate the SQLite DB into your Microsoft SQL server so the transfer is pain free, but I would make sure that anyone who is deploying in an environment that may have more than 100 VMs to deploy initially on Microsoft SQL. Another area to be aware of in scalability is not with Zerto itself but the demands it can put on the DR storage environment, you will be replicating all your VM disk writes as well as journaling and potentially adding more demand when testing (as the Zerto continues to replicate even when testing, which is great, but does hammer the storage).

We've had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

In one word, fantastic. When we evaluate a product one of the key areas we look at is the level of technical support we will get from the vendor. Bottom line IT systems have a habit of going wrong (one of the reasons I have had a job for the past 20 years), so once you accept that no system will be error-free, you need to know that if you do need help its available. We have had issues, bugs and questions and in every case we have been supported by the Zerto tech support team.

Our DRaaS platform, prior to Zerto, was an extension of our Asigra Cloud Backup platform. Whilst this worked it could not deliver the low RPOs we now see with Zerto nor the efficiencies we see from Zerto in managing day-to-day tasks on the platform such as validation, failover tests (and on the odd occasions actual live failovers). Our choice with Zerto was based on our own piece of mind, we protect a variety of end-users so never failing them (i.e. never failing to replicate their VMs and know we can spin them up when needed) was crucial, Zerto has delivered this for us.

Our deployment was fairly complex, but then we had to deploy a platform capable of multi-tenant support with complex networking and integration with vCloud Director so that customers could access their DR systems via a secure web interface. If you are deploying a site-to-site solution then deployment is very straightforward. Each site requires a Zerto Virtual Manager (ZVM) which is deployed upon Windows, this will then integrate with your vCenter servers at each site. From here it’s a few button clicks to deploy the Virtual Replication Appliance/s (VRAs) which are small Linux systems bound to each host that handle the ‘smart’ features of Zerto Replication, linking the site and your off.

Deployment was performed using in-house resources. The most important bit of advice I can offer to anyone considering implementing Zerto is understand your storage requirements at the production site and then decide on what levels of performance are acceptable. If you want to have low RPOs (seconds) then remember that you will be replicating all of your production writes into the DR storage device. And as initially these writes are put into the journal datastore and then read out after the defined retention period and written to the actual storage datastore be careful not to overload your DR SAN. As an example we deploy using separate SANs for journals and customer storage, with larger customers getting dedicated storage designed to accommodate their traffic patterns.

As a Zerto Cloud Service Provider (CSP) our licence model is different to end-users who can purchase the licence on a perpetual basis. For us the ROI was under 6 months, but we already had a large portion of the hypervisor and storage environment needed so were able to keep our costs to a minimum.

Zerto, in my opinion, is one of the best DR products on the market currently, its only flaw (if it can be called that) is that it is limited to virtual environments, specifically VMware & Hyper-V (it does also support replication to AWS if needed). If you are looking to streamline your DR capability and remove risk then speak to Zerto and get them to run you through a demo, what they say the product can do is not sales talk, it really can do it.

Zerto Dashboard

Failover Wizard

Recovery Checkpoints (Journal)

We use it mostly for VMs that are hosting client-facing applications and mostly client databases. We replicate 100 servers; we have 100 protected VMs.

We've never had any major headaches with the virtual-protection groups. They seem to work exactly as they should. If there's ever an issue with replication, we know right away, so it's all been very reliable.

Zerto is much easier to use than Veeam when you compare the two in terms of ease of use. Everything is very straightforward and simple in the Web Client. It's very clear if something is wrong, and everything in the Web Client works great. In Veeam, it's a little more complex; I find myself having to look through long error messages when a job fails. Whereas with Zerto, if I see a red VPG I can click on it. I would then know exactly which VM is having an issue, and I can try to troubleshoot the issue.

The time between releases is too long. Zerto doesn't seem to really keep up with the products with which they need to be compatible. For instance, the 9.5 updates 3 took about 90 days to come out after the latest version of vCenter 7.0 update 3 was released.

We were facing a vulnerability, so we had to choose between patching our vCenter to address that vulnerability, which would break the Zerto operability, or leaving it as is with a potential vulnerability. That was really the main issue we ever faced with Zerto.

I've been working with Zerto for the past three or so years, but my company used it before I started working there.

Zerto is very stable. I've never had an issue related to stability with Zerto, and anytime we have had any potential issues, we get alerts from Zerto. It has always been a simple fix. Also, the issue has never had to do with the platform; it's always been a VM that was powered off or deleted.

Technical support has been pretty sufficient. I've only had one or two cases ever that weren't related to looking for a release date, but I've had pretty good success with them so far.

I would give technical support a rating of eight out of ten. They've never particularly impressed me, but they've always done their job.

Positive

I was not present for the initial setup, but I deployed Zerto Virtual Manager. It was pretty straightforward. You walk through the wizard, and if you have all your networks on the server and everything is done correctly, you can start to build VPGs right away.

If you have all of the network and firewall rules already in place, you could probably stand up a new one in 45 minutes.

It's a pretty set-it-and-forget-it type of tool, and it's very reliable. So, I would rate it an eight on a scale from one to ten.

We use Zerto as a migration platform from a customer's data center or from their on-premises environment to our data centers. We also use it for disaster recovery.

Zerto has helped to reduce the number of people involved during a data recovery situation in our company. All we have to do is click a few times. We have even configured a DR solution for our customers so that they can do it themselves. We give them access to the Zerto platform, as well as have a small manual of instructions, and they can go do it. It's very simple to use and to deploy and to support. It does not have a very large learning curve.

For our clients who do DR in the cloud, Zerto has definitely saved them money. We only have a few DR client accounts, but for the ones we do have, there haven't been any failures of Zerto, whenever we do failover tests. It performs well.

It's a great platform because it's very well built, technically. 

It's also very much faster than any other migration or disaster recovery platform we have. I work with virtualization, mostly on VMware, and I must admit that Zerto is even better than VMware Site Recovery Manager. Zerto compresses the data and it works much faster. We use it whenever we can, and especially whenever we are on a tight time schedule for closing a project, or we need to bring information or VMs from a client or from another data center. Zerto is very valuable because of its speed.

And in terms of ease of use, when I started with my current company I didn't even know about Zerto. My first project was a migration from a big customer and I thought, "Wow, this will be a lot of work." It was a little scary because of the pressure to get it done. But Zerto was so easy to use. I like it a lot.

I've been using Zerto for about 12 months, but the company I work for has been using it for four or five years.

It's very solid, like a rock. It's very stable.

Even with the most recent customer that we migrated to our data center, it was really impressive that Zerto kept the levels of performance very consistent. This customer's site was at another data center provider, not one of ours. It was on a very old VMware version, and we were deploying them to the latest, vCenter Server 7. At first I thought, "We will be struggling to bring this customer over," because they were two major versions behind. I didn't think Zerto would be compatible for making this migration happen. But it worked like a charm, and we had no problems regarding Zerto itself. While we had some problems with this migration, they were not related to the technology.

It's very scalable. Most of our core usage here is for migrations from our customers' on-premises or data center instances. And about two years ago, we had a very big migration of over 3,000 virtual machines, and Zerto performed really well. That's why we have kept Zerto in our portfolio.

Their support is amazing. We have had to open some support cases and they have a very good technical team. They're always referring us to their technical teams if we need to discuss something. Or if we fail to understand some of the concepts, we can reach out to them too. It's more than a commercial relationship. They support us whenever we need help.

Positive

We do setups of Zerto every week or two weeks, because it's not a single platform. We are a multi-cloud environment and service provider. We deploy it according to project requirements. So we don't have a single Zerto platform. We are always deploying VMs and DRs.

Zerto is very easy and straightforward to set up. Whenever we want to use Zerto for a migration from an on-premises customer to our data center, we usually create a WAN to WAN link, or a LAN to LAN, or a VPN link between the customer and us. We just deploy the VPNs from our side to the customer site and request access to their environment. We check for special VM configurations. It's pretty straightforward. We don't like telling the customer to do it, even though it's very easy to deploy and configure, because it's part of our service to do this job for them. We also have our own guidelines and policies that we use to configure Zerto for the best migration setup.

The last deployment I did took me four hours, which included setting up both my side and the customer side, doing the pairing and, later, the VPG's. We migrated over 100 VMs and it took about two days to fully replicate their site to ours. The migration window to do the move was about six hours because they had to change applications. But the move itself took no more than two minutes for every Zerto machine. 

When I talk to the customers, I tell them that it will be faster than the move window we request. Most of the time set aside for the window is for taking applications offline, because they will often need to reconfigure them. When client data comes from an on-premises site to our data centers, there are usually IP address changes, or we have to update VMware tools, or do something at the Zerto machine level by changing Zerto hardware, such as a network card. The moving itself is pretty straightforward.

Because I'm a support engineer, I don't really work directly on the commercial side of things. Whenever I need to request a license for Zerto, someone on our dedicated licensing support team takes care of it. So I don't know if that process is easy or not.

Zerto works very well as a backup and recovery solution, with frequent recovery points. It's very good. But it's too pricey for us to use it as a backup solution for all of our clients. Not every customer needs recovery points every five seconds.

It's a great platform, if you use it as a recovery system and as a migration tool. It's really amazing. It's a very well-developed product and one of the best solutions. In the same way that what makes Microsoft big today is Active Directory, which is an amazing product and one that no other enterprise could do any better, Zerto is the same type of leader in its category and is at the very top, without a doubt.

In our case, we used Zerto Replicator mainly for DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan), but also for testing.

For example, journaling capability allows you to recover from a ransomware attack. Thus, it is not only used in DRP scenarios.

In addition, there are increasingly more environments (such as IBM BlueMix) that support Zerto replication, for public cloud contention environments.

Zerto allows RPO of seconds, without need of snapshots. It is agnostic to storage and allows journaling of up to 30 days.

For me, limiting the minimum licensing package for 15 virtual machines (VMs) is a issue. Not all environments (especially in Latam) start with 15 VMs.

No, not really.

No, not really.

The support is in English only, and I estimate it 4/5.

I know Veeam B & R and VMware SRM (along with vSphere Replication) and in environments with aggressive RPO, and non-reliance on snapshots, Zerto is a superior solution.

It is not really complicated, if you do a previous good design. Installation is non-invasive, does not require agents in the virtual environment.It is not really complicated, if you do a previous good design. Installation is non-invasive, does not require agents in the virtual environment.

The licensing is by virtual machines, start in 15, and grow in packs of 10. There is an annual support that must be contracted.

Yes. Veeam B & R and VMware SRM (along with vSphere Replication and storage-level replication) were evaluated.

It is important to have clear:

1. Required links between sites.
2. Available network (ideal network L2 inter sites).
3. Capacity for journaling (+/- 7%) in contingent site.

We use the ZERTO Implementation to pretend critical VM and Groups of VM (Application Consistency) from failing. The solution with ZERTO helpy us to TEST and Failover without pane. Installaion is based on local primary site and remote desaster site with a distance of a few 100km and a bandwith up to 30Mbit.

Managing the system is easy and reliable, you can choose any VM you want to replicate to your DR Site in Combination with other VM's. Testing a DR is easy and well reported.

Any business unit can define it's needs for SLA and the IT department is able to follow these needs with less management and overhead. If a problem occurs (like ransomware or db errors) IT department is able to roll Back to the right point without loosing productivity of other not effected VM. So for both business and IT it is much easier to use Zerto and profit from best function and best performance in these area of replication tools

Migration of complex VMware and Hyper-V solution. Using Zerto to replicate to azure and S3.

DR Solutions with less management and less space. Licensing of DR Site is not necessary until activation of VM. That are very good news for Db users.

As described above, only the WAN traffic regulation should be monitored, if it runs it works fine and absolutely stable

More VM more bandwidth over WAN, but this is normal. In competition with other replication tools, Zerto works well and compression is fast and stable. If you want to scale order license for it and go on.

Customer Service:

Really fast and helpful. The documentation is a good stuff to read before calling, most of the events are well described and could be solved easily by yourself

Technical Support:

very fast and very good

We uses before VMware Site Recovery. It is to complex and expensive at all.

Parallel to the primary replication tool Zerto, we are using VEEAM Always On Replication Version 9.5. It works but we can't replicate in the same manner as Zerto, because this tool works with events and they are queued so you will not be able to replicate in the same way as Zerto. Also the amount of VM's to replicate at the same time is limited to the VEEAM Environment of proxies. More Proxies more VM, but also more overhead and bandwidth usage.

It works fine for replicate a few times a day, but not in sec.

If you follow the documentation you need about 20 Minutes to first run of replication. This is fast and you can choose it if you want with the trail license from Zerto by yourself.

No we did by documentation and without external team.

Hopefully 50% less than with teh other solutions, we will have a look to it after a year production

Licensing is VM based so you can buy packages or single VM. Price is not low but the power of application is high, so you will get your money back, in case of Disaster situation. You will be so fast back in production and this is very rent-able for the business units you safe from outtakes.

Yes, Site Recovery and VEEAM Always On Solution

With the next generation Zerto5.5 they allow replication and production in azure, so cloud based DR comes reality.

Everybody who looks for alternative solutions in physical sync mirroring of data (Metro-cluster) should think about business needs and ABC (Application Business Continuity) Zerto can do it and helps you to keep business online with less cost than other solutions.

I've used it for a temporary migration. We had to shut down a data center and we moved some database servers over to a disaster recovery site. We then did the maintenance at the data center and brought them back.

We're using it only for on-prem and we use it to replicate from our onsite data center to a co-location, but there is a fiber connection between the two, so it isn't an internet-based replication.

In that migration instance we had six terabytes of data that we needed to protect and bring online quickly. We had a replication going and we made the protection group switch and brought the systems back within less than 30 minutes. It reduced our downtime on some critical applications.

If we hadn't used Zerto, we would have had to vMotion them to the other side and that could have taken hours. That could also potentially have been unreliable because there's a timeout period when vMotion works. We used Zerto to be safe.

It is pretty simple to use.

Whenever we do a failover, there's a confirmation box that shows up later. It's a little hard to see sometimes. We'll do the failover and some preparation activities and then there's a checkbox you need to check to continue and sometimes it's small, in the corner, depending on which screen you're using. A popup to continue would be a little bit better because then you're not sitting and waiting for something and it's already there.

We also had an issue with a misnamed network. They should make that a little more apparent when it's not available on the destination side. We were able to go all the way through with it, but when we did the recovery, it wasn't available. A pre-check to say, "Hey, it's not available. What network do you want to use?" would be helpful.

I have been using Zerto for about a month because I'm new with my current company.

The stability has been alright. We have failed over quite a number of machines.

We did have an issue with one failover. It didn't fail over completely. You really don't want to have to contact support in those situations, but we had to. It could have been an issue on our side as opposed to something being wrong with the configuration. I don't know what happened, but they got it working.

We had to call support during that migration because one of the settings wasn't correct. I don't know exactly what went wrong, but we had to create a ticket. Zerto got back to us within an hour, so we were really impressed with the support from them. It was really good. They got us taken care of pretty fast and we were back online during the process, within an hour. They were quick to respond after we submitted the ticket and then they got it fixed. There's not really much more they could have done in that situation.

Positive

We use VMware-native as well as Zerto. It's all circumstantial, based on sites. Some sites ended up getting an SRM license, so we have kept them instead of wasting licenses. And some sites use Zerto. Maybe down the road we'll pick one of the products, but for now, we use both.

Zerto was already there when I stepped into the picture. I helped initiate some of the disaster recovery processes. Based on what I saw from the outside, it was easy because it was ready for that situation quickly. It was ready in a business day or less, aside from the replication aspect or the data sync from when you first set up the jobs. But the basic setup to get things going was ready within less than a business day.

I would think we have seen return on the investment in Zerto because we use it a decent amount of the time. We have reduced the downtime within the last month because of it as well.

We've used SRM from VMware. Personally, I prefer Zerto because it's a little more automated. VMware has more requirements and VMware tools get us stuck sometimes. If the VMware tools aren't working on a virtual machine, it won't replicate over as quickly or start up as quickly because it's waiting for that service. You have to do custom settings to avoid that. Zerto doesn't have that requirement. It's a little more click-and-go versus click-and-monitor and then trace back and see what went wrong.

Zerto is also probably faster because SRM waits for VMware tools to come up and say, "Hey, we're here." That's not a requirement that I know of, with Zerto. Maybe it is. I'm a newer user of the product.

In terms of the number of staff involved in data recovery situations, Zerto hasn't really reduced that. My team generally handles those situations and it's the same number of people, regardless of which product we're using.

Zerto worked and did its job and it was easy to use. My team liked it, and the database administrators, who were the customers in that instance where we did the temporary migration, appreciated it.

I would rate it at eight out 10. Sometimes the interface can be a little tricky. If you're using a disaster recovery application, you're in a stressful situation already. Sometimes there are a lot of confirmations you have to go through just to start the Virtual Protection Group, and then it starts and you have to confirm again a few minutes later. You're stressed out. You're talking via chats with a bunch of people and there were times where that prompt was probably sitting there for minutes, which cost money.

More confirmations upfront and removing that second one later on in the process would be good, or a popup, instead of it being a small checkbox in the corner of the screen, is my recommendation.