Zerto DR (ZVM)

I have used HPE Zerto Software to help protect virtual machines in my environment. The company I worked for, which I am between roles from, was AHEAD. AHEAD has an internal lab and also maintains a great relationship with their partner, HPE Zerto Software. In their lab environment, our own little personal playground, we had HPE Zerto Software to use between our DR and prod lab environments.

HPE Zerto Software has enabled me to perform disaster recovery in the cloud rather than in a physical data center. That was pointed directly to Azure, not even vSphere on Azure. I used it for that purpose a couple of times.

The impact that HPE Zerto Software has had on my IT resiliency strategy is night and day. Without HPE Zerto Software, it takes considerably more planning because other solutions make you jump through more hoops than HPE Zerto Software does. When I would receive a statement of work and HPE Zerto Software was the solution, it was always a relief. This could be for a large client with thousands of VMs, and I knew that a subset of those VMs were going to be used by HPE Zerto Software for DR purposes. Beyond the ease of use, I do the projects for the clients and then hand it off to them for management. I have not had one client come back in over almost a decade and say the VPGs broke. The only calls I would get afterwards were when they made a change and tried to do something that cannot be done. I would go in there and perform a bitmap sync to get their VPGs back to synced.

I have seen HPE Zerto Software reduce downtime in situations, and it is absolutely responsible for it. The downtime with HPE Zerto Software is especially reduced with synchronous replication because you are always going to have the ability to get that last sync before the production environment went down. As long as you have it all set up properly beforehand, you could be up and running in no time because the VM placeholders with the latest information that it could grab are already waiting for you. You just run through the process and commit, and then it reduces downtime tremendously.

I like the user interface the most about HPE Zerto Software; they did a fantastic job. There are solutions that I had to teach myself that have nothing intuitive about them. The user interface could almost allow someone with IT knowledge elsewhere to get started on day one post-deployment because of how HPE Zerto Software lays everything out. Ease of use, the user experience within the web console, and the resiliency make it such a great product. I have also used it to convert people from a VMware environment to a Hyper-V environment, changing hypervisors and getting off of Broadcom's new subscription model. It converts and deploys a VM from VMware over to a Hyper-V host and makes it a Hyper-V VM, which is very impressive.

The biggest thing for anybody using HPE Zerto Software is the planning, as that is the hardest part. It involves saying that these are the VMs you want to protect, here is their current IP addresses and network info, here is the destination, and this is going to be its destination IP address and destination network info. You pick your data stores and choose one for journaling. As long as you plan and know exactly what to do and how to roll back in the case of an event, which is another thing HPE Zerto Software can help out with, it makes it great. HPE Zerto Software works, and it is not hard to implement. It could be a little tedious if you have a lot of VPGs with a lot of unique VMs that are going to all have unique settings, and then you have to configure each VM within that VPG. The virtual protection group can be set up for a bulk of VMs with the same settings, and with one button, you could test it and have it fail over. You then have time to commit before, so you get to check out the VM on the destination side, and before you hit commit, you make sure it looks good, hit commit, and then it is off of production and onto DR. You then do reverse protection. It is really an all-in-one DR solution. In my opinion, customers do not really need to invest more past HPE Zerto Software except at the storage array level, which is outside of HPE Zerto Software.

I think the near-synchronous replication feature of HPE Zerto Software is good. Async replication is good when you have a subset of VMs that are not moneymakers or your top tier because async, depending on the interval set on it, will sync, perhaps once a day or two times a day. However, there are some VMs that need synchronous replication, which is live time pretty much. Async has its place and needs to be there because there is less bandwidth going over the wire with async as opposed to having every single VM in your vCenter synchronous live time with every write and every IOPS going over the wire. Async will give your bandwidth a little bit of a break, depending on your scheduling of how often you want it to sync.

One time it was really frustrating because I had one customer that needed to have an on-prem VMware environment and they were going to native Azure, not vSphere in Azure. The customer did not want me to use t-shirt sizes for the VMs that would be spun up. He wanted dialed-in resources for each VM. Of course, VM resources for every single one of them are different. I had to sit there and for each and every VM, go to Azure, find the best EC2, and find the best native sizing for VM sizing. That took me a couple of days to do that for about 200 VMs, but it worked at the end. Providing a way where if there is ever going to be an add-on feature for native Azure to have it built-in where you could get a recommendation instead of just t-shirt sizes, small, medium, large, but being able to actually pull in something from Azure would be beneficial. Maybe when you pair it to your Azure site, it can give something somewhere in the VPG creation for the destination part and offer a more customized VM based on the source's VMs, CPU, and storage resources.

I feel the importance of this feature is significant. The whole landscape of IT is changing, and a lot of people are bringing things back on-prem or having some type of Azure Local. I think you want to have the ability there. I do not think it is a feature to remove because there are still tons of use cases for companies doing a one-to-many and a cloud is one of the sites. HPE Zerto Software's native Azure should remain, and I would just make sure that Azure Local is also a landing destination that is supported.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for eight years.

I give HPE Zerto Software resiliency also a nine out of ten. I just will never give a ten because I believe there is always room for improvement for everything. I have seen some lagging or crashing, but that is not a HPE Zerto Software issue. Usually, nine times out of ten, that is when I tell them, "You are running everything over your one-gig management line. Let us set up a dual NIC, get a brand new VLAN, and separate replication traffic." There have been cases, but again, it is not a HPE Zerto Software issue; it is a customer network issue.

I have not seen a situation where it was ransomware or some other cause. HPE Zerto Software's resiliency is really good. I have not seen it go down except without a customer going in there thinking that they know what they are doing and they end up unpairing the site or something. When it comes to uptime in general and a DR solution in general, HPE Zerto Software is why you have to pay what it costs, and that is because that is how good it works and how easy it is to use.

I have had to contact HPE Zerto Software's technical support, and they were great. They put in some extra work for me because I had a very odd request. It turned out that HPE Zerto Software would not work with this one Linux VM because HPE Zerto Software covered every version below it and every version above it, but this one particular build was not supported. The customer had their hands tied because it was for a third-party application where they could not upgrade. The support team went to the engineers and the dev team to see if there was anything they could do. They broke down the reason for us, though I forgot the exact reason, and we got a solution for the customer by just rebuilding it on the new production site. That was the one time that I had extensive usage with the support team. I usually have not had to open up too many HPE Zerto Software tickets. I can usually resolve anything that is going on with the VRAs or VPGs not syncing. I usually troubleshoot that myself, and with almost 100% success at this point.

Regarding HPE Zerto Software support, they are great. I do not even give myself a 10 on my self-evaluations, so I will say nine. I just always hate the extremes. There is always room for improvement.

I use Veeam for customers, and I use Veeam's instant recovery to also convert VMware virtual machines to Hyper-V virtual machines. HPE Zerto Software is a more straightforward process. You have to create a backup job for each VM with Veeam, which doubles the storage footprint on the customer side at first, and that is a limitation right there. It can have issues with certain VMware VMs. If they have a weird BIOS setting, Veeam will fail when it is trying to convert it to Hyper-V, whereas I have not run into that with HPE Zerto Software. Veeam has its place, but it should not be used as a primary DR solution in the way HPE Zerto Software is.

The deployment of HPE Zerto Software is very easy. You download the OVA, which is nothing more than a configuration file that you go into your vCenter and deploy. It is called OVF in vCenter, and you upload the OVA file, and it walks you through it with a wizard. From there, you are giving it a name, an IP address, and the DNS FQDN. You are telling it what cluster or host you want it deployed on and what datastore you want it to be deployed to. It shows you the default sizing, which you can change if you want to, but usually I would leave it alone. Then you click deploy and you wait for it to deploy. Once it is up, you test it by pinging and hitting the IP address you just gave it into the browser. Unless the customer gave me the wrong IP address or I fat-fingered the wrong name that they wanted to use or something, that is the only time I ever have had to scratch it and deploy from step one. The whole deployment process is as easy as could be.

I think the pricing of HPE Zerto Software has some complaints. I am an individual contributor and have been the senior engineer deploying it with the customer, so I receive the statement of work and the TDD. That is the one complaint from maybe not small companies but maybe not huge enterprise clients like MetLife and Alphabet, where price is not a factor and they do not even think about the cost. However, there are other semi-large companies that do say HPE Zerto Software is too expensive and that they could get around it by using a less sufficient solution in my opinion. Pricing, while I do not know the exact price, I can tell you that over the past eight years, I have heard that at least half a dozen times about pricing being the only thing that caused a customer to go to another solution.

My overall score for HPE Zerto Software is a nine out of ten. HPE Zerto Software is great, and I think it always has room for improvement. I listed one area for improvement where bringing in additional Azure properties for the destination VM when you connect to an Azure site would be beneficial. Little things such as that, I think will go a long way. The product itself, as it stands today, I would recommend to anybody that is looking for a DR solution. It is not because I know it inside and out, but it is because I know it inside and out compared to its competitors.

I am using HPE Zerto Software for disaster recovery with my clients. I was trying to solve challenges with HPE Zerto for business continuity planning. HPE Zerto Software helps me achieve a business continuity plan. I have used HPE Zerto Software to protect virtual machines in my environment.

HPE Zerto Software has a positive impact on my resilience strategy. The disaster recovery solution works without issue and is easy to integrate. The overall effect on my RPO is one hour. It helps to reduce downtime in situations. We had a use case where we experienced an issue with the data center and restored using HPE Zerto Software replication for more than 24 hours. If not for that, the recovery would have taken more than 24 hours. HPE Zerto Software helps to reduce my organization's disaster recovery testing by approximately 75% in terms of time saved. We set the RPO to four hours. For the RTO itself, we set it to about 10 minutes, so it performs well. HPE Zerto Software saves me time in a data recovery situation because of ransomware or other causes. We can roll back for the deployment based on the checkpoint, and we have a 24-hour checkpoint for that, which saves us roughly about 24 hours to restore if we have the backup. It is faster to perform recovery with HPE Zerto Software.

The biggest advantage of HPE Zerto Software is that it is easy to use and the compatibility is acceptable. The compatibility, or integration, is correct. Near-synchronous replication is important to me. For applications, especially critical applications, we need the data to be up to date if a disaster occurs, and with near replication, it is almost similar to the existing or production environment, so we do not have any data gap.

It is important to conduct disaster recovery in the cloud. It is important because we are a cloud service provider, so it is important for us to be able to perform disaster recovery in our cloud. The ease of use is straightforward with no issues. HPE Zerto Software is the best in terms of simplicity and ease of use.

I would like HPE Zerto Software to support more hypervisor platforms than currently available. Support for additional hypervisors could be added in the future. Since we have multiple platforms, we would like to have more support on the hypervisor platform for HPE Zerto Software to be able to replicate.

I have more than 10 years of experience working with HPE Zerto Software.

The stability of HPE Zerto Software is close to 99%, probably about 90%. There are no glitches or latency issues, but more on bugs that require upgrades. Sometimes we need to upgrade to follow the latest version and hypervisor version, and occasionally there is an issue where we could not get the service up and running as soon as we would like.

There is no issue with the scalability of HPE Zerto Software.

Support can be improved in some areas. We were an HPE Zerto Software partner before the acquisition by HP. At that time, support was better, but it is still acceptable. There is no issue with the support currently, but it was better when HPE Zerto Software was still a separate company rather than after the acquisition. I would currently rate support as eight.

Installation is quite straightforward.

If you compare it with the business impact of disaster, the value cannot be quantified. I have no issue with the ROI.

I find HPE Zerto Software affordable.

The difference with Veritas is that they focus more on backup rather than disaster or replication. For other products similar to HPE Zerto Software, probably Veeam replication could be considered, but Veeam focuses more on the backup tool rather than replication for disaster recovery.

I am a partner using HPE Zerto Software. We do not work with the public cloud. I rate HPE Zerto Software as nine out of ten. I have 12 years of experience working with these kinds of tools, not only from HP but also from other vendors, for backup and network access control.

The major use case for HPE Zerto Software is to protect virtual machines from ransomware by taking replicas and running all machines from VMware while replicating them to other sites.

Some customers also use HPE Zerto Software on the same site as a backup. They take snapshots to another datastore or another vCenter server and use that as a backup. If something happens, they can start that environment as soon as possible.

Currently, our customers are in the pharmaceutical industry, so they do not go to the cloud with HPE Zerto Software. They prefer on-premises only, and although we are recommending they move to the cloud, they are not allowing it.

The biggest advantage of HPE Zerto Software is that we can recover machines as soon as possible, so there is no more downtime. If something happens, we can recover that machine in a few minutes.

HPE Zerto Software has an impact on our IT resilience strategy.

When there is some disaster recovery, we have to start our new environment and begin restoring the machine from HPE Zerto Software, but I think we do not have any impact.

HPE Zerto Software does not have any effect on RPO if it is a local site; if it is on the other side, then the RPO will be no more than 15 minutes.

HPE Zerto Software helps to reduce DR testing for testing purposes, as we regularly conduct DR drills, which are useful for us. We can also generate a compliance report that we can share with our customers.

The best features of HPE Zerto Software are that we can schedule replication with minimum RPO, meaning it takes no more than 15 seconds to replicate from one side to the other side if there is good bandwidth. We can recover machines with less than one hour of data loss, as customers can tolerate no more than 15 minutes of data loss.

In general, HPE Zerto Software solution is quite easy to use.

I need to check if there is anything that HPE could improve in HPE Zerto Software, but there was a query that a customer raised that I do not remember right now. I can send you an email about it.

The area of improvement I remember is related to the interface of HPE Zerto Software; the first deployment was very crucial for us, but now we can do it without any problem.

The drawback with HPE Zerto Software is that once we restore that machine, the original is still working and we restore a new machine, but that IP remains the same. We already raised this issue with the engineering team, but they indicated that the IP will be the same. I think the IP should be removed at that time; when we restore the same machine with a different name, it should get restored with a different IP. It is getting restored, but the IP also comes with that.

We have been using HPE Zerto Software for the last one year.

Regarding the stability and reliability of HPE Zerto Software, according to our customer, it is the best product for them, so they keep buying and have increased the license as well. First, they purchased 10 machines; now they have gone to 200.

HPE Zerto Software license is scalable enough.

To add a new device to HPE Zerto Software, it is easy to do. If a customer adds new servers, we can create a new VPG or add it to the same VPG.

I agree that HPE support for HPE Zerto Software is helpful.

If I had to rate support for HPE Zerto Software from zero to 10 points, where 10 is the best, I would give them a 10.

Our clients usually try to resolve issues while implementing HPE Zerto Software, but we do not have any issues while implementing it. The first time we took support from HPE; now we do not have any issues with implementation.

I think HPE Zerto Software is not expensive, as it comes with five years at not much cost.

In comparison with other backup solutions like Veeam, Veritas, and others, I would say that HPE Zerto Software is the most advanced one, as there is no competition right now.

Veeam also does not provide that minimum RPO; it has a one-hour or two-hour RPO. With Veritas, there is no competition, and Data Protector is no competition. Only Veeam and Commvault are there, but they do not provide minimum RPO as HPE Zerto Software can provide minimum RPO within a few seconds.

I do not have any examples to compare the speed of recovery with HPE Zerto Software.

Summarizing everything we have discussed about HPE Zerto Software, I would give the product in general 10 points, as 10 points is the best tool. I would rate this review a 10 overall.

My primary use case for HPE Zerto Software is as a disaster recovery solution and to protect myself against ransomware attacks.

A specific example of how HPE Zerto Software has helped me in a real situation within my organization is that when we suffered a ransomware attack, having isolated copies that were not accessible from our on-premises environments allowed me to recover the backup image of those machines and overcome that attack.

Regarding my experience using HPE Zerto Software in critical situations such as the one I mentioned, it is a tool that I believe is fairly easy to use, given the complexity involved in configuring the type of problem you are trying to solve.

Now I can say that I have a proven recovery strategy, as it allows you to perform that type of testing for certain use cases without a real disaster, and the recovery processes are quite fast.

My experience when performing those recovery tests has been that being able to recover machines in less than one hour, between different clouds or between on-premises and the cloud, are figures that give me great confidence in the face of any possible disaster.

I consider the best features that HPE Zerto Software offers to be the number of different heterogeneous environments it supports and the recovery plans between on-premises and cloud, between multiple clouds, and how easy it is to configure the environments and recovery use cases.

I can elaborate on how compatibility with heterogeneous environments and ease of configuration have made a difference for me and my team, because you do not have to depend on different tools as your organization grows. It allows you to first have a tool configured between an on-premises environment and a cloud environment, and once you have services deployed in the cloud, it allows you to use recovery plans between different clouds to be protected against a possible disaster.

Something that I truly value in this solution is the user interface, which I find very user-friendly.

I believe HPE Zerto Software could improve in certain aspects that emerged after HPE acquired this software.

Following the acquisition of this product by HPE, I think there are certain aspects that could be more suitable. Regarding necessary improvements, it would be beneficial to have licensing plans that are a bit more flexible and more accessible.

I have been using HPE Zerto Software for more than five years.

I consider HPE Zerto Software to be stable.

I rate the scalability of HPE Zerto Software as very good because, as I mentioned before, it allows you to use different clouds and on-premises environments.

I rate HPE Zerto Software's customer support as very good, and I have had direct experience with their support service.

Before using HPE Zerto Software, we used backup solutions from Veeam, but we did not use disaster recovery because it was not as comprehensive as Zerto.

I have seen a return on investment since I began using HPE Zerto Software, as we have demonstrated resilience against ransomware attacks because we used the tool during one of these attacks.

The primary example of how that resilience has translated into tangible benefits for the organization is the reduction of interruptions, as the ransomware attack did not stop any processes because the information was easily recoverable.

My experience with the price, implementation costs, and licensing of HPE Zerto Software is that, as I mentioned before, the licensing is somewhat complicated and the prices are a bit high.

I did not evaluate other options before choosing HPE Zerto Software.

My advice for other professionals considering implementing HPE Zerto Software is to conduct a proof of concept and to not allow your data centers to be without a disaster recovery tool. I would rate this review eight out of ten.