Zerto DR (ZVM)

In most of the companies where I have seen HPE Zerto Software  deployed, it is primarily used for DCDR purposes. It is very easy to test failover during audits to demonstrate the capability to auditors, and during disaster recovery scenarios, it is very easy to failover from one site to another. HPE Zerto Software is quite a GUI-friendly tool.

The failover feature in HPE Zerto Software is quite easy and intuitive, and the best part is that once your workload is migrated to another DR site, it automatically picks up the VLAN and gets powered up so your production is up and running there.

Sometimes the virtual private group that is created in HPE Zerto Software is sluggish. Searching all the VMs, categorizing it, and filtering it are areas where HPE can enhance more to make it more user-friendly.

The live synchronous feature is what gets used everywhere in HPE Zerto Software. The workload VM and the DR VM are in live synchronous mode at all times, with approximately seven milliseconds of latency, so both workloads are in near-sync.

HPE Zerto Software has made operations quite easy. Before using it, there was manual intervention required for everything. For example, with the SRT tool I used previously, I had to migrate VMs from the DC to DR for DR testing and then power them on manually, attach them to the correct VLAN, and handle all those configurations myself.

On many occasions when there are slowness issues in one of the regions, we need to quickly migrate workloads to another paired site, and we use HPE Zerto Software for that purpose. Otherwise, I would have to power off servers, procure new servers to support those workloads, migrate them to a newer server, coordinate with the network team to configure VLANs, handle DNS configurations, and manage many other tasks. With HPE Zerto Software, none of this is necessary, and instead I can use it to migrate workloads to the paired site.

The virtual private group that is created in HPE Zerto Software is sometimes sluggish. Searching all the VMs, categorizing them, and filtering them are areas where HPE can enhance more to make the interface more user-friendly.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for more than three years now, as it was being used in my previous company and continues to be used in my current company.

HPE Zerto Software is pretty much up and running consistently. Every time I access it to check anything, it is always up and running. Unless the underlying infrastructure is having some issue, HPE Zerto Software from the OS perspective and VM perspective is quite stable.

I cannot comment much on scalability based on my experience, but for the workloads I have seen, there are more than 100 to 150 plus servers that are being kept in synchronization at all times, and I think HPE Zerto Software is quite stable for that scale.

The customer service is quite fast and responsive. I would rate them a nine because sometimes it took time for them to understand what my issue was, but once they grasped it, they were swift to respond.

I have used the SimpliVity  recovery tool, which is also being used here. The SRT tool does the same thing, but it is very basic and not as rich as HPE Zerto Software is. Many times it needs manual intervention for tool maintenance.

With HPE Zerto Software, I have not seen anything our team needs to do on the HPE Zerto Software end because I have used it for more than three years in my previous company and here as well, and no maintenance has been required as far as I know.

Recovery time objective and recovery point objective are important metrics. HPE Zerto Software is something that is quick and fast in achieving these. The live synchronous feature always keeps my workload in synchronization, so anytime a disaster happens or any sort of incident occurs, my workload is up and running on the other side. Users working with and utilizing the systems do not feel any difference in the backend.

HPE Zerto Software is very easy to learn. The HPE Zerto Software website has proper documentation similar to how VMware provides an HOL lab to try out and test products. HPE Zerto Software provides very elaborate documentation with guided steps, and they even provide basic certification to start with. The GUI that they have makes it very easy to understand.

For everything, I would rate HPE Zerto Software an eight overall. It is a quite good and rich tool. I do not understand why every other company is not using it more often. HPE Zerto Software is now into the cloud as well, so if you want to have a DCDR setup with your DR in the cloud and DC on-premises, you can use HPE Zerto Software during your disaster recovery situation. However, I think this capability is very little marketed.

My overall rating for this review is eight out of ten.

I am using HPE Zerto Software  to protect almost 50% of our 100% VMware-based environment, with three levels of protection—Silver, Gold, and Platinum—ensuring data safety and consistency.

My usual use cases for HPE Zerto Software  involve operations spread around two geographical locations in Brazil, with one in the south and another in the southwest, about 500 kilometers apart, ensuring our operations and customer operations continue if something bad happens.

As an MSP, I serve customers who use HPE Zerto Software for disaster recovery in our infrastructure rather than a physical data center.

Having disaster recovery in the cloud is essential for us because I trust in a hybrid environment design, which our business needs for disaster recovery.

HPE Zerto Software's most valuable features for us are the ease of use and implementation, along with its ability to detect suspicious ransomware situations proactively, which is very useful and differentiated.

HPE Zerto Software has positively impacted our organization by allowing us to grow our business as an MSP, leading to a revenue increase of around 10%, and as a customer, we have not experienced any downtime for the past four years, achieving 100% uptime.

Overall, HPE Zerto Software has significantly impacted our IT resiliency strategy by enabling us to have a cost-effective disaster recovery solution without the need for expensive hardware or data center space.

I believe HPE Zerto Software could be improved by enhancing support for a wider range of hypervisors, as many customers are transitioning from VMware to alternatives, and I need HPE Zerto Software to integrate with these new environments.

I have been working with HPE Zerto Software for around four years, since HPE bought HPE Zerto Software and we started to use it.

I have had situations where stability was tested, but HPE Zerto Software has helped me recover our operation as expected. I would rate the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software as a 10, which I believe is fair enough.

In terms of scalability, HPE Zerto Software has shown no limits. I started small and have since expanded our environment significantly without encountering any limitations.

Regarding technical support, I occasionally encountered issues mostly associated with onboarding new environments or integrations, but core operations ran smoothly most of the time, with support usually meeting expected deadlines.

Before using HPE Zerto Software, I was actually still using another solution based on Veeam Backup & Replication for part of our environment. I decided to start using HPE Zerto Software when new needs arose for quicker RPOs of seconds, as my previous tool only allowed hours.

HPE Zerto Software's initial setup was very straightforward, with no significant challenges, largely due to the great support from the vendor.

I participated in the initial setup of HPE Zerto Software, which was impressive, completing a POC in just one day and having it fully operational in less than four days.

HPE Zerto Software has dramatically reduced the headaches I faced with DR testing. Now I conduct tests weekly and sometimes even twice a week. I believe HPE Zerto Software has saved my technicians more than 50% of the time in data recovery situations.

I am aware of the pricing and licensing of HPE Zerto Software. I would say it used to be an affordable solution, but as competitors emerge, pricing may come under pressure.

I evaluated other solutions when searching for disaster recovery options, but I selected HPE Zerto Software because it was the best fit for our needs. In addition to HPE Zerto Software, I looked at Veeam, storage-based replication, VMware's vSphere replication, and Commvault, with VMware replication being the closest in terms of RPO. VMware replication was the closest solution but was limited to VMware, while HPE Zerto Software offered a multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud solution, which was crucial for me.

While I appreciate the time saved, we are always striving for a more efficient operation and aiming for a 70% time savings. In terms of usability, I find both HPE Zerto Software and Veeam to be equally easy to operate. HPE Zerto Software's recovery speed is comparable to other solutions, as recovery speed largely depends on our physical environment. I rate this review a 10.

I used HPE Zerto Software  for replication of virtual machines. I can speak about one special case with one of my customers in the past. This was based in a VMware environment to replicate the most critical virtual machines to the secondary data center, and also to run several tests during the year. The solution was fantastic because it performed correctly and we could recover in the secondary data center. I have used HPE Zerto Software  to help protect virtual machines.

My favorite feature of HPE Zerto Software is the journal functionality. Because we can recover the virtual machine at the last replication, but we can also recover using the journal to recover the virtual machine before a specific event, for example before ransomware. If we have detected the ransomware at one point in time, we can recover before this event.

I think HPE Zerto Software's near-synchronous replication is the best in the market for replication. In my opinion, I checked other tools like Veeam and others, and this is the best because it's a specific tool to run disaster recovery and works at one hundred percent.

What I dislike about HPE Zerto Software is maybe the reporting. The reporting is basic. Some customers want specific reports, and we have to connect to other third parties or third tools to extract the information. Maybe this is something that HPE Zerto Software should work on and improve.

Using HPE Zerto Software helps to reduce DR testing because the DR test works properly. However, customers want to get a runbook for the DR test. We can recover virtual machines in order using HPE Zerto Software, but we cannot create dependencies between machines. If we run this first machine, then we could recover machines A, B, C, D in sequence. This is something that customers have requested in the past.

I have been working with HPE Zerto Software for four years.

In my experience with HPE Zerto Software, we do not have any kind of issues.

Talking about the scalability of HPE Zerto Software, it's proper in my market. I'm not sure about enterprise accounts because I remember they have some stoppers since we can scale to several virtual appliances. But in my market and with my customers, it worked properly.

I contacted HPE Zerto Software support and it was good.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give a score of eight to the support of HPE Zerto Software.

The overall support quality and the speed of answers from HPE Zerto Software is standard in the rest of the vendors. It depends on if the case is critical or not, but in my opinion, it's the standard in the market.

Deploying HPE Zerto Software is very easy.

It took me time to deploy HPE Zerto Software for the first time.

I only had to review the virtual appliance and also check with an HPE Zerto Software presales representative. After that first attempt, I could do it by myself and it worked fantastically.

For the deployment of HPE Zerto Software, we need two persons: one from the partner in my case and in my role, and also one from the customer.

About the pricing of HPE Zerto Software, I'm not sure because I don't remember what the price is. In the past, it was expensive. Not much expensive, but more expensive than other vendors. I tried to close some deals, and the customer felt the solution was good and they wanted it, but they discarded it for financial reasons. Other solutions cover similar functionality but not the same RPO or enhancements. They decided from the financial side and discarded HPE Zerto Software, and maybe this is something to change.

In the past, I used alternatives to HPE Zerto Software such as VMware Replication and also Veeam Backup or Veeam Replication. I used these two options.

My overall experience in this field is two years.

The overall effect of HPE Zerto Software on my RPOs is that the RPO is the minimum that I know with the other vendors. We can recover the virtual machines near to zero, near in seconds. We have to recover the vital virtual machine with the last change in seconds.

HPE Zerto Software has helped me to reduce downtime in various situations.

For example, with the same customer from before, the recovery only takes minutes for the critical machines to be recovered in the secondary data center. The vital machine can start and we can test it and confirm it's working properly and also run the failback. In my opinion, it's fantastic.

I would rate this review a seven out of ten.