The primary use case is disaster recovery.
Zerto DR (ZVM)
BYNETExternal reviews
External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Great interface, easy to use, and simple to update
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
The biggest benefit is the application-consistent disaster recovery functionality.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features include the ease of use and the usability of the user interface. Long-term, the solution has proven to be very resilient and stable. It meets our DR needs for VM environments.
The near-synchronous replication is a great feature. You have near real-time DR capabilities. In the years I've used it, we've had application-consistent profiles. To meet the recovery point and recovery time objectives, it helps to have that on hand.
It's affected our RPOs positively. It totally meets them via near-synchronous replication. That means the VM stays in a consistent state and is always available.
What needs improvement?
Zerto could improve its reporting capabilities. That's lacking. The alerting capabilities are lacking as well, partly due to the fact that there's no way to trim down the alert fatigue if there are failures within the application. It will send out alerts consistently instead of spreading the alert times every 30 minutes, hour, et cetera.
For how long have I used the solution?
We've been using Zerto at our organization over the past eight years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is very stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I cannot comment on scalability. We only have two Zerto instances installed, one in production and one in DR. We haven't had to scale out or to the cloud.
We are protecting upwards of 100 virtual machines.
How are customer service and support?
Zerto's support is good. They are responsive from an email perspective. I've never had to pick up the phone to call them for anything beyond our DR testing every year. In those cases, we do open a proactive ticket in the case that we run into issues with recovering virtual machines.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We did not use any other solution previously. We chose Zerto since it was an application we inherited. It wasn't something I specifically chose, however, understanding the industry, we know that it is the top player in terms of software recoverability for virtual machines.
How was the initial setup?
I did not initially set up the solution; I inherited it. However, over the past eight years, we have gone through a number of upgrades, which for the most part have gone seamlessly. We did have a few issues in the past that support was able to fix in a timely fashion.
What was our ROI?
I'm unsure if the company has witnessed any ROI. We have not gone through any TCO analysis.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing is outside of my purview.
What other advice do I have?
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. If the reporting and alerting functionality were better, I'd rate it ten out of ten.
Easy to use, quick to understand, and simple to set up
What is our primary use case?
In my previous company, we used it for recovery. We'd use it for annual DR testing. At that point in time, I was doing recovery for a few customers in government, financial, and other institutions.
What is most valuable?
It's easy to use. It wasn't too difficult to start with. With most vendors, initially, you have a learning curve or configurations. In this case, Zerto was quick to understand. The dashboard was easy and the UI was simple. The experience is comparatively good with Zerto.
The near-synchronous replication has not been used much. That said, it does help when talking about storage layers. The availability of the VMs is good. In terms of resiliency, there are a lot of benefits to it. Most have a recovery of 24 to 48 hours; Zerto has gotten recovery down to four hours.
We've done a POC with a DR to AWS. It was limited, however, it worked well and there was support. We didn't run into any challenges.
The effect on the RPOs has been excellent. It's been impacted greatly. Customers enjoy the shorter timeline to recovery. The customer confidence is high.
What needs improvement?
Now, everything is moving to the cloud and many modern app solutions are based on virtualization and cloud, however, for situations where Unix platforms are used, we'd like them to be able to support that.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've used the solution for almost five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is pretty stable. Sometimes there may be bugs, however, so far, I haven't personally found any bugs beyond the initial setup.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There is a wide range of scalability with different storage solutions.
We've deployed Zerto with 40 TB of storage layers.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is good.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used NetBackup and v-Motion. I'm familiar with Commvault and Veeam, which is also a fast solution.
When we used VMware V-motion or other methodologies, with Zeto, once you have your SAN hooked up well and your networking component set, then you failover to the recovery. With Zerto, the recovery times were less compared to what we witnessed with our previous traditional methods.
How was the initial setup?
I was involved in the initial deployment. My job was to get Zerto up from scratch and make sure the configuration, network, storage, et cetera were up and running. It's fairly simple. There's a learning process, however, once you know it, it gets easier.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I'm not involved in the licensing process.
What other advice do I have?
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
Good for protecting VMs, has useful, near-synchronous replication and helpful documentation
What is our primary use case?
I use Zerto for disaster recovery.
How has it helped my organization?
The time it takes to fail a server over to DR has been great. We've seen a reduction in time spent. We can do it in minutes. Being able to go back to certain snapshots, to failover to another location, and then go back to specific snapshots is quite useful. We can roll back easily.
What is most valuable?
The off-site replication is excellent. We have workloads that aren't DR-aware. Being able to replicate it to other data centers is great. We don't have another way to do it, currently.
The near-synchronous replication is good. You get five-second data points. It's not something we advertise to our customers, the developers, however, we've had instances where we needed to go back two hours, prior to a file being deleted, and it's helped.
We're protecting our VMs with Zerto. It's positively affected our RPOs. It meets the objective. It's the only way we can have a solution for certain applications where we send an entire application to another data server.
What needs improvement?
It's a great product. There are a lot of features that it has that we don't use since we are on prem. We strictly use it for DR between our data centers. There are a lot of cloud plugins that they have that we don't use. Our use case is limited. It does everything we need it to.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for probably four or five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of Zerto is good. We didn't have any issues. Our biggest challenge was trying to get to the clients and I was waiting on an upgrade path - from Windows to Linux. Now there is an upgrade path. Honestly, that has been the biggest challenge we've had for five years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of Zerto is good. You can easily protect other clusters and VRAs. It's very flexible.
Our current environment has 45 VRAs in each cluster. We have two replica pairs, two sites that mirror each other.
In total, we have 70 ESX hosts.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is great. They've shown us many things about the manager that we didn't know about. Every time I call, I take notes. They are very knowledgeable and the knowledge-based articles on the site are also helpful. Even if I thought something was broken, they've always managed to fix it.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We used to use VMware's SRM. With SRM, for us, it was overly complex. We used an array-based replication with SRM. We had issues where the storage team would go to do work on the array and they would fail the machine over and it wouldn't be right. We would have outages. Every time we did a failover it was a process and we would be missing rules.
This is not array-based and we can test our failover in a sandbox without taking the system down.
How was the initial setup?
The initial deployment was easy. We deployed VRAs to the host from the manager. It works very well. The amount of VRAs you have to deploy and the amount of time it takes is minimal. It took us about an hour.
What was our ROI?
I can't speak to if the company has witnessed any ROI.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I don't follow the licensing. It was bought for us and we use it.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We evaluated SRM and a few others. I can't remember which ones we tested. We've been on Zerto since version six.
The selling point for us, coming from SRM, is that SRM was tied to vCenter. We had to pay attention to versions and there were a lot of ways you had to make sure the versions were correct and it was overly complex for what we needed. We simply needed to replicate a virtual machine and that was it. Zerto stood out as it was easy.
What other advice do I have?
I'd recommend the solution to others. I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.
Easy to use, fast, and good near-synchronous replication
What is our primary use case?
We use the solution mostly for disaster recovery, however, we use it a lot for VM migrations and data center relocations.
What is most valuable?
The ease of setting up replication, the speed, and the ease with which I can fail over and fail back are all excellent aspects of the solution.
We've used Zerto for failing over and moving a lot of workloads from one location to another during v-center upgrades, during data center relocations, et cetera. We even had a case where we had a need to move over to our DR data center, however, in the middle of running there, our DR data center started having thermal issues, so we had to bring everything back. Zerto made that super easy.
Previously, we were using SRM. In the case of the thermal event, SRM would probably have taken, I'm guessing, an hour or two to do the failover. With Zerto, we were able to get everything moved over in about 15 minutes, and it was roughly 150 or 200 VMs that we did in that time period.
The near-synchronous replication works. It's very quick. I like that I can fail something over and not lose any data. That's pretty important. We want to not lose data. As a healthcare organization, losing patient records would be a very bad thing.
It's important to have DR in the cloud right now. We're looking at leveraging AVS for our DR site for the sake of not having to run our own data center. Leveraging the cloud is super important. It will help us to get away from on-prem and not even have to deal with a co-location facility. The reliability will be important. There is also the impression that there is going to be money savings around that.
It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. Overall, the RPOs have gotten better. Every aspect compared to where we were with SRM or prior to that, Zerto has improved. It's a lot easier to manage Zerto as it is hardware agnostic. It helps get things failed over and protected quickly. Every aspect has improved with Zerto.
What needs improvement?
Some of the ability to automate selections and automate VPG creations could be better. We've been building out a lot of new V-centers lately, and new data centers. Whenever we create a VPG, we generally set some very specific settings. If there was a way to set a template or a blueprint, to say that if I'm replicating to a data center from here, these are always going to be my default settings. That would be ideal, instead of having to manually set everything every time.
There are a few issues we've had with Zerto where it doesn't behave the way we want it to. I'm being told it's by design. Therefore, it's not an issue per se, it's by design.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Zerto for three or four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I've had no problems with the stability. There have been a few bugs along the way, however, Zerto has been very quick to work through them.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have 1500 to 1600 VMs protected with Zerto and most of our DR strategy is being built around Zerto.
I can't speak to scalability. We've been steady-state since we implemented it. It's been protected by the same workloads since then.
How are customer service and support?
Zerto support has gone downhill recently. When we first started, they were great. However, after the HP acquisition, the quality of support is not as good. The knowledge has dropped and the time to respond is slower. I seem to now get people who ask basic questions that I already answered when I opened the ticket.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we were using SRM. SRM was a nightmare. Zeerto has been drastically better.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is expensive. However, I definitely see the value and my corporation sees the value.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did look at Veeam and were using SRM in the past and Zerto seems to be the most full-featured and the easiest to implement. It's also the most powerful overall. Veeam isn't even close to what Zerto can handle right now.
What other advice do I have?
We're mostly on-prem, however, we've started doing DR into AVS - Azure VMware Service.
I'd rate Zerto eight out of ten.
Easy to use with great speed of recovery and helpful support
What is our primary use case?
We are primarily using it for migration and data protection. We use it for protection of the VM and data protection.
How has it helped my organization?
It's the easiest way to support DR as it does the conversion for you. After converting, it protects again. If you don't want Azure, you can just go back on-premises, for example.
We can monitor VMs more easily with Zerto. We can always check if they aren't properly syncing. The migrations are also easy.
What is most valuable?
The overall impact on our RPOs has been amazing. The ease of using it is great. Everyone is embracing it in our company.
The ease of use is ten out of ten. It's the easiest to use.
The speed of recovery is great, especially the failover/failback. It helps our company a lot.
The most valuable feature is the GUI. It's very simple.
Setting it up is very easy.
Everything is automated using scripts.
The solution saves a lot of time and there is no downtime based on how the product is designed. If there's any downtime, it's only a second or two if we move.
The near-synchronous replication is great. It just works. I'm a big fan of Zerto.
What needs improvement?
Right now, the solution is perfect. They shouldn't try to do everything. Zerto is DR and needs to focus on that. Everything works for us. There is nothing to improve.
They already released the features that we want. We aren't missing any features.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using it for almost five years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
At first, when Zerto was bought by HP, we thought it was just going to be HP. However, Zerto is really working out and the stability is great. I hope they continue what they are doing and refrain from making major changes.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Zerto scales pretty well. They have a lot of customers. The word of mouth is helping with growth.
It scales well with our environment with the conversion from VM to Azure and vice versa. It's so easy. There's no middle-man involved. It's just Zerto.
How are customer service and support?
The technical support is hit or miss. If it is a high-priority ticket, you get great Zerto support, however, if you just have a question, they redirect you to their documents.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We previously used SRM before Zerto.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup was not hard at all. We deployed a VM and had our team open the ports and we were all set.
It only takes about an hour or two if you have the proper people helping you with the networking.
What was our ROI?
We have witnessed a lot of ROI. Being technical, I always ask to make sure management is happy with the product we are trying to use. With the migration feature, it's way better now. We are able to migrate from the old data center without any disruption. That's a big win.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing is fair. The pricing is very competitive and it works well. You are paying for a product that is easy to use and just works.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We've evaluated multiple DRs and some VMware products. Zerto was the winner due to the GUI. Also, it just works.
What other advice do I have?
I have colleagues who are doing a POC with Zerto and will begin using it based on my recommendation.
I'd rate the solution ten out of ten. If I could give it eleven out of ten I would.
Great for disaster recovery with good uptime and near-synchronous replication
What is our primary use case?
We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery.
How has it helped my organization?
We set up the environment and we're testing right now. We are able to do test recoveries and restalls. Once we have everything set up, we'll try a real failover test.
What is most valuable?
The DR - Disaster Recovery - is the main selling point. We have a policy that requires us to have, in case our primary goes down, a failover for our production environment to another site.
The near-synchronous replication is very good. You can set it to a second. It's important to our company. All of our applications are a part of our production. We need to have uptime. We have an SLA that meets uptime requirements and needs to stay up to maintain our company reputation.
We are also protecting our VMs.
It's had a positive effect on our RPOs. It's meeting our objectives.
What needs improvement?
The journal history is only up to 30 days. If it were longer, it would be better and I would have more flexibility.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for a little over a year.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability is great. It is running well.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability is not too bad. We upgraded our server and we were able to scale easily. We installed Zerto on our VMware with no problem. We have about 200 VMs and Zerto is protecting about just under 100 of them.
How are customer service and support?
Technical support is an area I'm not too keen about. My experience is 50/50. Level one support doesn't seem very knowledgeable and I don't get the answers I want. That can delay us sometimes. Hopefully, they will improve.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Neutral
How was the initial setup?
I was involved in the initial deployment.
The process is not too bad. The process was pretty straightforward.
What about the implementation team?
The vendor provided implementation support.
What was our ROI?
We have noted an ROI. Compared to others, overall, it made sense to choose Zerto.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
They are not cheap. They are more expensive than others. However, they have great features.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did test other solutions. The speed of recovery in comparison testing was great. That was the reason why we chose Zerto over our competitors.
We looked at Veeam Orchestrator and Veeam is not as complete in terms of DR.
The ease of use of Zerto and the interface are easier to understand and use.
What other advice do I have?
I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. It's around version eight.
I'd rate the solution eight out of ten overall.
Simple and easy to understand with a clean interface
What is our primary use case?
We primarily use the solution for disaster recovery.
How has it helped my organization?
It’s improved our organization via providing better RPOs and excellent uptime.
What is most valuable?
The best aspects of the solution are the simplicity of use and the way that it handles the RPOs and the RTOs. I like that we’re able to dial into exactly what we want. They've been able to give us better RPOs than we ever imagined.
It has a very clean interface and is easy to understand. You don't really need a lot of technical knowledge to understand what you're doing.
I don't know if it's the compression or what, however, we get really good RPOs. The system already knows what we're trying to do. It’ll estimate and give us better RPOs than what we've actually set.
We’ve improved our RPOs 100-fold.
Uptime is excellent. The last test fail-over recovery was within almost thirty seconds to a minute. It was very, very good, and I was very impressed. This is extremely vital. We have to maintain a lot of uptime. The data that we have is constantly being written and it is very vital that we stay up for public safety reasons. To be able to have something like this solution, that can fail over and fail back easily, makes us much more agile in the data center.
What needs improvement?
There are a few technical aspects that I didn't care much for. For example, we’ve made a transition to hyper-converged technology, which is moving more towards provisioning and being smaller and more agile. Zerto requires these thick provision walls for virtual machines that are always running. I know that they're temporary. However, they're constantly running and they eat up a lot more disk space than they need to. Maybe if there was a little more of a stronger relationship with VMware and how they operate, some of that could be better managed.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using the solution for three or four months.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It's scalable. If we need more, we just ask for more. If we need less, we scale it down.
We're already looking at how we can leverage it on other sites. To do so, we simply just buy a few licenses, deploy a couple of VMs, and then it's off to the races.
The size of our current environment is about 40 terabytes of virtual machines that we are protecting.
How are customer service and support?
We've never had to contact technical support.
How was the initial setup?
Our experience with the initial setup was easy. It took 15 minutes.
What about the implementation team?
We leveraged a third party for deployment. The person we hired wasn't that technical, and only knew the basics. However, it was so easy we really didn't need him.
What was our ROI?
We're still waiting on the ROI. However, it will be very easy to calculate the minute we have a failover.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward. You license what you use.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We also evaluated VMware's cyber recovery manager. We chose Zerto due to the fact VMware’s solution was very complicated, very difficult to use, and required a lot more effort to be able to set it up and make sure that it worked. There was a lot of debugging to make sure things were working properly. Whereas Zerto was almost effortless. I was able to implement Zerto within minutes. Without exaggerating, within ten minutes I already started replicating.
What other advice do I have?
The solution just works. It works in the background and it is very hands-off. Once you set it, it just goes.
I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.
It saves a lot of time because we can hit a button and let it do its thing
What is our primary use case?
We primarily use Zerto for DR as a service but also for high availability purposes. It's mostly deployed at our on-prem colocation data center. We also do a little on the cloud, as well.
How has it helped my organization?
Zerto makes DR a lot easier. We don't have to spin up copies of VMs or copy applications and databases. Zurto just takes care of all that for us. We just did our annual DR test, and it worked exactly how we expected it to. We're big fans. We like the fact that when you migrate DR, it will automatically be configured for us. For example, it sets the IP addresses because they have different IP ranges and various data centers.
It saves a lot of time during disaster recovery. In our tests, we just hit a button on Zerto, it did its thing, and the solution just let us know when it's done. In the meantime, we could go do other things instead of having to, copy app configs, .ini files, etc.
What is most valuable?
The near-synchronous replication is great. That's one of the reasons that we went with Zerto. I've had a great experience with it and never had an issue. Having this functionality is critical, especially for DR. If our main data center goes down, we need to flip it and have everything almost identical to what it was when the data center went down. We use it for production high availability, so if that host goes down, Zerto will just automatically forward to the replica that it has on another data store.
What needs improvement?
The post-configuration part could be improved. For example, it would be super helpful to have the ability to modify DNS. Once the migration is done, we want to do some more modifications to the endpoint.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have used Zerto for around 10 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Zerto is highly stable. We've never had any issues or lost connections between the agents on the VMware host.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Zerto is scalable. We're running it in five different data centers worldwide, and we haven't had any performance issues. It covers 70 hosts across all our data centers.
How are customer service and support?
I rate Zerto support nine out of 10. We haven't had to use support much because it just works. Once we had an issue with a VM that wouldn't upgrade, and they sorted it out for us pretty quickly. I've only used it once, but it wasn't a time-critical situation. If I contacted them during an actual disaster or DR test, then I could see how quickly they can work.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Positive
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I've never used anything besides Zerto, but I've done the failover process manually. Zerto just makes it much easier and faster than a manual failover process.
What was our ROI?
In our DR testing, Zerto allows us to go work on other things while it takes care of everything. That's valuable because we know that we can still hit all of our SLAs in a real disaster.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Zerto is reasonably priced for the product that you're getting. We keep on buying more licenses, so it's a good price.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Zerto 10 out of 10.
It enables us to set the IPs and map everything out in our environment prior to migration
What is our primary use case?
We've been using Zerto for data center migration, but we will begin using it for disaster recovery. Because of some data center issues, we're still using version 9.5. One of our data centers is at 6.5 and the other one is at 7, so we can't move any or upgrade to 10.
What is most valuable?
Zerto enables us to set the IPs and map everything out in our environment prior to migration. We can create VPGs and mass migrate applications, databases, and web clients. That was the selling point for us. The product is easy to use. We had a 30-minute onboarding process from our sales engineer, who showed us how to use it.
We don't use near-synchronous replication yet. It will be essential when we start using Zerto for DR, but it isn't a big deal during our current migration. Once we have a DR site, it will be essential to have those time slots we can restore to in the event of malware and ransomware.
What needs improvement?
Right now, if you have an error, it creates a link that takes you to a website to review information about the problem. It would be nice if Zerto could give you information within the app instead of referring you to a web application.
For how long have I used the solution?
Zerto for two years.
How was the initial setup?
Zerto is intuitive. We could set everything up in the environment within a day and a half and start migrating on the third day.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Zerto 10 out of 10.
Reduces the recovery workflow to just a few minutes
What is our primary use case?
I am a system engineer and IT architect. We use Zerto to protect our production -environment and critical applications. Everything is on-prem. We don't do any DR to the cloud. We're protecting around 300 VMs right now.
How has it helped my organization?
I've been fortunate enough not to need to rely on Zerto in an actual disaster, but we do testing every year. Sometimes, it's multiple times annually or at the year's end. It takes the recovery workflow, which would normally take a lot of planning, and reduces that to just a few minutes.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature is the low RTO that covers our VMs and a secondary data center.
What needs improvement?
I would like Zerto to add support for VMware's lifecycle manager.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have used Zerto for about eight years.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
I rate Zerto eight out of 10 for scalability. We have one instance per data center that supports everything that we need, and we haven't had to scale past that.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
It's been several years since we've looked at other products. We used VMware SRM in the past, but Zerto is way faster. Zerto is easier to use than other solutions we've tried.
How was the initial setup?
Zerto is easy to set up. Once you've deployed the appliance and connected it to a vCenter, your VMs are protected pretty quickly.
What was our ROI?
Zerto costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year, and we haven't needed to use it in a real DR situation, so it's hard to quantify an ROI. However, based on what we know from testing, it will be a huge benefit in the worst-case scenario.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Zerto's pricing is pretty competitive. They recently went through a licensing change where you have to buy an enterprise license as an organization. We weren't happy with that just because it forced us to pay for extra features we don't use. We would prefer if we could still have that standard license.
What other advice do I have?
I rate Zerto nine out of 10.