• Replication from Hyper-V to ESX so I can retire my old environment
• Failover from Site A to Site B

Before this product, we had a lot of custom scripting and multiple other products to try and get to a similar place that Zerto allows without fully managing to. Zerto allows for a more granular replication ability and therefore a more flexible model than the per-socket licensed alternatives. It is positioned fantastically for pay as you grow which is just what we were after.

• IP Addressing of failed over VM’s isn’t working properly.
• Over time, it would be great to get more meat on the bones in the backups side of the product.
• Ability to add hard disks to a VM and have Zerto just pick up those changes rather than perform a full re-mirror.

There are many post migration activities associated with a Hyper-V to ESX migration – don’t presume this is a hands off activity as it very much isn’t at this time.  To make it hands off, there would be a ton of custom scripting required.

There have been no issues with the stability.

It has not been an issue to scale it for our needs.

The product has significant promise but it’s a long way from fully functional, there are fantastic features in the product and fantastic features promised “in the next release” too. Make sure you run through a good sizing exercise first.

The simplicity of replication and test failover make this a very easy-to-use solution.

We did not have disaster-recovery plans for some of our critical systems because application-based solutions were too expensive and complicated. Moving these applications to VMs and creating DR plans using Zerto makes a complicated failover much easier. 

Remediating VMware clusters gets more complicated because the VRAs are pinned to each host and will prevent the host from entering maintenance mode. The cluster must now be remediated manually because once all VMs are migrated from the host you must power down the VRA manually and perform the remediation. Once remediated you can exit maintenance mode and restart the VRA and allow VMs to migrate back to the host.

6 months

When we were deploying our POC we had some errors in network configuration that had to be worked out in order for Zerto to function properly. I can't understate the importance of getting your networking configuration done in advance.

Once you have your network configured the Zerto configuration is simple. We implemented a proof-of-concept deployment in about 2 hours.

We implemented in-house as part of a proof-of-concept with a Zerto engineer.

We primarily use this solution for Replication and Disaster Recovery.

We now have the ability to replicate critical data to a secure, off-site location that can be brought back in seconds if needed.

The dashboard is very user-friendly and easy to navigate.

The email alerts can be excessive, so better control over frequency or resolution may be a worthwhile improvement.

Cloud-based disaster recovery. However, do your homework on your provider. There are several options besides Azure and AWS that don't have their surprise charges. Be sure to check them out.

Would not do a virtual based disaster recovery solution without it. Or would not do a virtual to virtual migration without it.

It just works. This sounds simple, but it is so true. So much of what we are sold in IT doesn't work as advertised. Zerto does.

It's coming, but I want to do my backups from my DR side without impacting my production side. This is supposed to come out in v7.0.

Rock solid, it just works. Make sure your Windows boxes are not previous in-place upgrades. Bugs between the Windows components create issues with assigning IP addresses. This is a Microsoft issue and not a Zerto issue. 

It's being used for hundreds of machines. It just works.

Tech support is great. They help troubleshoot things that are not their issues. See Microsoft upgrade note above.

Yes, VMWare Site Recovery Manager. SRM is not as intuitive and is VMware version dependent. Zerto does not have those issues. 

Very easy setup. Like all DR solutions, it requires planning. Specifically the network side. Don't skimp.

Use a Zerto cloud service provider. They generally know their stuff. 

Amazing ROI considering I don't have to buy a second set of hardware for my DR site. I can use a cloud provider and only pay when I need it.

Check your cloud providers. You don't have to host the DR side yourself. Also, look at folks other than Azure and AWS. The hidden/surprise costs will knock your socks off.

Veeam (no CDP), SRM, RecoverPoint for VMs, Double-Take.

No.

Zerto is used to provide real-time replication for the important virtual machines that my organisation uses to our Disaster Recovery (DR) site to ensure business continuity. 

The ability to test which virtual machines can be failed over to our DR site without interruption of our production environment. Being able to do file level recovery in case you delete a file accidentally or want to recover from a ransomware attack.

It allows for my organization to quickly recover from any disaster with very little downtime utilizing a user interface that requires minimal knowledge or experience.

I cannot think of any new features that should be added at the moment. With time, I should be able to make suggestions.

None whatsoever.

The only issue that I observed was that depending on the number of virtual machines that are being replicated, you will have to provision the appropriate bandwidth for the link that the replicated systems will traverse. Zerto gives you a bandwidth calculation estimate, but in my case that still was not enough to handle the volume of traffic being generated by our virtual machines.

10 out of 10.

We used to use Veeam Backup and Replication. We encountered some loss of connectivity with Veeam when we replicated some of our larger virtual machines that we hosted on our older virtual machine hosts.

It was straightforward and easy to setup. Once the software was executed, all that was needed was the basic environment details as well as the hypervisor information.

We implemented through a vendor team. They were very experienced and were able to provide detailed answers to all of our questions.

We expect to achieve a ROI within four years of the purchase. However, the ability to almost instantly failover and the fast file level ransomware recovering times give you that peace of mind that allows for low stress levels.

The setup will require that you have a domain controller and DNS at your DR site as well as a second hypervisor product (VMware vCenter Server/Microsoft Hyper-V) there as well. So, the additional software licensing will have to be factored into your operational budget. 

No, we did not. When we did our research, Zerto was the name that always came out as the market leader.

Near real time continuous disaster recovery, Journaling and the ability to replicate from Hyper-V and other VMware clouds into our cloud.

We provide this product as a service to our clients. The ease of providing test failover results to them is invaluable and only takes a few minutes to initiate and complete so no time is wasted.

More Supported Hyper-visors

2 year

Non What so ever very straight forward and easy to complete. Also upgrading to the latest version could not be easier to do.

Not once in the last two years.

Non scales easily with an appliance on each ESX host and a central management console.

Excellent

Excellent

We did use a previous product which was clunky to use and was only a point in time image. Zerto is simple fast and reliable and our clients like the charts we can produce and is near real time.

Initial install was straightforward and simple to complete with the minimum amount of time taken up.

We had Zerto help us with the implementation and they were brilliant.

We pay per month per protected VM which is vastly cost efficient.

Yes, I looked at VMare SRM and Veeam Replication.

If you are looking at DR products put Zerto straight to the top of the list if you are using VMware or Hyper-V.

• Journal: ZVR uses a journal of history changes. Whenever you need to failover a VM or group of VMs, you have the ability to choose a Point in Time to which those replicas should be switched. For instance, if a disaster occurs at 10:05:00, you can failover with replicas to 10:04:55.

• Consistency Groups: If you replicate groups of VMs, then during failover, all of the VMs in groups are failed over to the exact same point in time.

• Resiliency: ZVR is resilient to Zerto infrastructure component restarts and loss of connection between sites which are automatically handled. The ZVR is very lightweight it doesn't use snapshots and has close to zero impact on production VMs and many others. It lets you get your files from Windows based VMs without failing over to replica VMs.

Before ZVR, we had many limitations in case of protecting production VMs during working hours. This primarily came from frequent VM snapshots impacting users. ZVR lets us protect our VMs without any impact upon users and greatly improved our RPOs from hours to seconds.

I would like to see a couple of details regarding awareness of VM events coming outside of ZVR. This could be a user reverting VM back to an older snapshot, which can sometimes screw up the replica, but nothing major besides it is affected.

We have used this solution for over three years.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

ZVR can handle thousands of VMs, so there were issues with scalability here.

Support is very quick in their response time and most of issues are solved in a matter of hours.

We were using Veeam Replication which is based on snapshots. However, ZVR has no snaphosts, zero impact on production, and improves RPOs seamlessly.

The initial setup was very straightforward and can be done in less than one hour. You can then start replicating between two sites.

We did the implementation in-house.

Licensing is based on the number of VMs to replicate. The first thing should be to get the number of VMs to replicate based on your business needs.

Before ZVR, I evaluated Veeam Replication, vSphere Replication, and RecoverPoint for VMs.

If you need to replicate your VMs with RPOs of seconds, then Zerto is certainly the way to go.