Zerto for BC/DR vs Veeam vs SRM

KapsZ28

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I have been seeing Zerto more and more lately. We are considering trying it out for DR and BC. Right now we have Veeam, but mainly only using it for backups onsite and offsite. I have used SRM before, but obviously SRM is not as friendly when it comes to storage as Zerto is. What do you guys think about it especially when compared to Veeam and SRM?

Also curious what people think about CommVault?
 
I have been seeing Zerto more and more lately. We are considering trying it out for DR and BC. Right now we have Veeam, but mainly only using it for backups onsite and offsite. I have used SRM before, but obviously SRM is not as friendly when it comes to storage as Zerto is. What do you guys think about it especially when compared to Veeam and SRM?

Also curious what people think about CommVault?

Hi KapsZ28 , thank you for your interest in Zerto. I will let others give their opinions but i just wanted to say if you have ANY questions about Zerto please do not hesitate to contact us.

You can also sign up for a free trial of Zerto on our website http://www.zerto.com/trial-request/
 
Tested out Zerto briefly but entry cost is high and it is expensive per vm compared to other products. It does also work differently from other products but as we are just starting out in DR space, high cost of entry really killed it for us
 
Ultimately it comes down to what your RPO requirements are. I don't use Zerto but the Internet says that ~10 second RPO is about average and it seems to me that this is what adds value to Zerto (and that it's not using snapshots!).

If you don't need that kind of RPO then IMHO makes sense to look at lower priced products instead.

Also, looks like someone has a Google Alert set up! Welcome to the forum David!
 
Yep if you need this type of RPO then its a good product and does what it says. Some clients love to have it but don't want to pay for that feature :)
 
Ultimately it comes down to what your RPO requirements are. I don't use Zerto but the Internet says that ~10 second RPO is about average and it seems to me that this is what adds value to Zerto (and that it's not using snapshots!).

If you don't need that kind of RPO then IMHO makes sense to look at lower priced products instead.

Also, looks like someone has a Google Alert set up! Welcome to the forum David!

Yes I do and boy am I glad. Helped me find this great forum!

Been looking around the last couple days, some great conversations going on!
 
How about Unitrends as a full backup/recovery and DR solution compared to Veeam? They seem to have pretty good reviews in DCIG and I have not been impressed with Veeam for backups do to many snapshot issues.
 
I'm about to start testing Unitrends next week. Its a bit confusing with the amounts of products they have and I still haven't gotten the pricing for their virtual products. I only was able to get pricing for the UEB. Still waiting for UVB.

I did recently completed testing of Nakivo. Testing was successful and I didn't experience snapshot issues that i saw happening with veeam. Nakivo's version 4 is pretty good, does support multi tenancy and pretty affordable.
 
Zerto is solid. It's easy to stand up and works as advertised. Some devils in the details on how you setup your journal volumes and stuff, but nothing complex. Yes, it costs more than others but keep in mind it does replication and failover... It also has very good dedupe and compression for the replication traffic. Not uncommon to see 5:1 or 7:1 reduction in traffic over standard array-based replication solutions.
 
I haven't reviewed all the details of the setup, but something that would be nice is easy integration to a client site to be able to replicate back to our DC for DR. Is this something that is done by deploying a VM at that client site and setting up a VPN tunnel to replicate back to our DC?

This isn't something we have done with Veeam yet either since I have been rather disappointed with their backup solution. And with SRM I feel like there is too much integration into vCenter to use well in a multi-tenant environment.
 
yep from what i read about the setup, you need to deploy helper vms at client site. I think its one helper vm per esxi host. Zerto works on host level instead of snapshotting vms so setup is different from veeam, nakivo and such.
Then these will talk to your master controller at your DC over vpn. But remember vms replicate over will have ips that your client has on their side. you will have to figure out a way to adjust those on your site. Not really sure if zerto helps with that.
I haven't set these up, going by memory of the conversation we had with sales engineers at zerto few months back.

Alex
 
yep from what i read about the setup, you need to deploy helper vms at client site. I think its one helper vm per esxi host. Zerto works on host level instead of snapshotting vms so setup is different from veeam, nakivo and such.
Then these will talk to your master controller at your DC over vpn. But remember vms replicate over will have ips that your client has on their side. you will have to figure out a way to adjust those on your site. Not really sure if zerto helps with that.
I haven't set these up, going by memory of the conversation we had with sales engineers at zerto few months back.

Alex

Yeah, I am used to setting up DR with the new IP addresses. That is one benefit I like with SRM especially over the basic VMware Replication.
 
When deploying Zerto you install a manager VM and then you deploy ZRAs, Zerto Replication Appliances. Each vSphere host gets one or more lightweight ZRAs which handle the actual replication to the other site(s). When you fail a VM over to the other site you can tell it to change the IP, just like with SRM.

Zerto works well with vCloud Director for multi-tenancy environments. I've built that out and it works as advertised.
 
I can also say that Zerto is solid and works as advertised.

It's very easy to deploy and get running. Their management interface is straight forward and all the failover/testing options you'd expect to be there are easy to configure.

The ZRAs are lightweight and don't waste much cpu, even with high IOPs workloads. The only thing I'd be careful of is to make sure you plan where to keep the journals. If the protected VM can do more IO than the target journal can keep up with it will fall behind. Same goes for WAN bandwidth to the failover site.

It really depends on your requirements for failover though. Zerto is very SLA and RPO centric so you can have it match your requirements, as long as you know what those are.
 
When deploying Zerto you install a manager VM and then you deploy ZRAs, Zerto Replication Appliances. Each vSphere host gets one or more lightweight ZRAs which handle the actual replication to the other site(s). When you fail a VM over to the other site you can tell it to change the IP, just like with SRM.

Zerto works well with vCloud Director for multi-tenancy environments. I've built that out and it works as advertised.

I'm curious what kind of tenant side controls there are... is there a portal for them, or is the service provider responsible for all of the config day to day?
 
I'm curious what kind of tenant side controls there are... is there a portal for them, or is the service provider responsible for all of the config day to day?

For the Cloud Service Provider (CSP), there is the Zerto Cloud Manager (ZCM) which is a centralized administrative tool used to allocate and permission CSP resource access. If the provider has multiple datacenters, it allows them to provision those resources as a logical pool of resources to customers. It also abstracts the customer locations into a logical organization called a Zerto Organization or ZORG. This allows the CSP to allocate, manage and bill customers that may have multiple locations as a single logical entity.

From the customer's side, Zerto has a Zerto Self Service Portal or (ZSSP). This portal allows access by the customers via their web browser and they can only perform the functions per the role based permissions granted to them by the CSP in the ZCM. For example, in the ZCM, the CSP might allow a customer to perform non-distruptive testing, but not actual failovers because they may need business approval before an actual failover event can take place. The ZSSP is either a stand alone portal or can be integrated into a CSP's existing portal.

Please feel free to ask any further question
 
For the Cloud Service Provider (CSP), there is the Zerto Cloud Manager (ZCM) which is a centralized administrative tool used to allocate and permission CSP resource access. If the provider has multiple datacenters, it allows them to provision those resources as a logical pool of resources to customers. It also abstracts the customer locations into a logical organization called a Zerto Organization or ZORG. This allows the CSP to allocate, manage and bill customers that may have multiple locations as a single logical entity.

From the customer's side, Zerto has a Zerto Self Service Portal or (ZSSP). This portal allows access by the customers via their web browser and they can only perform the functions per the role based permissions granted to them by the CSP in the ZCM. For example, in the ZCM, the CSP might allow a customer to perform non-distruptive testing, but not actual failovers because they may need business approval before an actual failover event can take place. The ZSSP is either a stand alone portal or can be integrated into a CSP's existing portal.

Please feel free to ask any further question

VERY interesting... I am curious what the ZORG actually means as the CSP related to chargeback in general. We'll be entering VSPP very soon I expect, but you are staying dedicated to vCD _DESPITE_ the fact it is service providers only? If so, then we'll reach out through proper channels given that I cannot do it here. Can't say more than that.
 
VERY interesting... I am curious what the ZORG actually means as the CSP related to chargeback in general. We'll be entering VSPP very soon I expect, but you are staying dedicated to vCD _DESPITE_ the fact it is service providers only? If so, then we'll reach out through proper channels given that I cannot do it here. Can't say more than that.

vCloud Director is not required to get all of the benefits of the ZCM and ZORGs. In fact, the majority of our CSPs don't run vCD.
 
Disclaimer: I do not work for Zerto or Veeam but I have partnered with, sold and supported them both for several years.

To the OP: you are comparing Zerto to Veeam (Unitrends was mentioned also), which is an apples to oranges comparison. Both Veeam and Unitrends are fundamentally backup products that have some additional functionality thrown in. Zerto is purpose-built for replication with a little bit of backup just recently thrown in (Zerto doesn't like to call it backup though). I don't consider Veeam and Zerto to be direct competitors so if you want the best overall solution you would consider using both products for their intended purpose.

I can tell you from a replication perspective, you will not find another product that even comes close to Zerto, except maybe EMC RecoverPoint (there is a really good reason for this that I won't get into here) but RP takes days or even weeks to deploy and can be very complicated. Zerto on the other hand can be stood up and replicating in an hour or two. There are some differences between the two but in a fully virtualized environment Zerto wins hands-down.

Zerto works on a write-split basis, which means no snapshots for replication. Again...no snaps. Veeam, vSphere, array-based asynchronous (not synchronous, that's totally different), etc. all use snaps, which are then replicated. Zerto is continuously replicating so it's always sending a stream of replicated I/O to the remote site. This is why the RPO for Zerto can be seconds where the others will be higher. Now I know that Veeam for example can schedule replication down to a minimum of something like 15 minutes or whatever but doing that on a busy VM is asking for trouble. I've also seen Veeam improperly configured and finding numerous snaps that weren't deleted (this will kill a VM's performance and eventually take it down hard) once Veeam completed the replication. Not Veeam's fault but it's an opportunity to make a mistake that Zerto doesn't present. Zerto also doesn't need to worry about quiescence (VSS) since it's not pausing the VM to snap it. No snap so no VSS issues to deal with...pretty cool eh?

One last thing: Zerto's replication is highly optimized for remote transport but Veeam's...not so much. I've seen Veeam replication for jsut a few VMs kill a 20Mb connection and still fall behind each day until it's just too far behind to ever get caught up. The newer versions of Enterprise Plus have some WAN optimization, which helps but then the price goes way up if all you need is some fairly basic backup.

Don't get me wrong, I like Veeam A LOT but only for it's true purpose of backup. If you have a large amount of bandwidth and can tolerate a rather high RPO then the Veeam replication will work, just not without some pain. I absolutely love Zerto and preach about it constantly to my sales teams as it's the most disruptive product in the industry for what it does. I've also worked with Unitrends and found that it had potential but was really lacking. It also has just about the ugliest interface I've seen in a long time.

And by the way, if you think Zerto is expensive for what it is then you haven't looked around much. The last RecoverPoint project I built was over $100k. You would get quite a lot of Zerto for that much money. :)
 
We spoke to Zerto recently. Just waiting on a POC. Pricing isn't too bad and the way it works seems a lot better than Veeam. We hadn't touched Veeam replication until recently. I didn't realize that Veeam was also using snapshots for replication. In many cases it wouldn't work well because we would want to avoid constant snapshots during the day and only doing a snapshot at night is not exactly the best RPO. I did a search for Veeam RTO and was very disappointed in one of their stories they published.

https://www.veeam.com/success-stori...te-rto-with-veeam-backup-and-replication.html

They claim a 5 minute RTO because the customer was using the Instant VM Recovery. While the recovery is instant, it doesn't take into account for how old the data, and that is something that is really important. One of the main reasons for using replication as a DR solution is to keep the data as up to date as possible and that is part of our RTO.

I am not familiar with the EMC RecoveryPoint, but we use NetApp SnapMirror as well. Definitely more expensive to have double the amount or NetApp's for storage. I think that is a gap Zerto will fill in. I am not sure what they recommend, but I have been happy with using Windows Storage Server with Veeam for storing backups or replication jobs and spinning up the VMs from there.
 
We currently use Zerto in production to protect about 40 VMs between our main and DR datacenters (about 100TB of total data), with RPO under 10 seconds easily on all protected machines. Would be happy to chat with you about our experiences with it if you like...we are fans. :)
 
It's been over a week and they still haven't contacted us back about setting up a POC. Oh well, I guess they didn't want our business after all.
 
It's been over a week and they still haven't contacted us back about setting up a POC. Oh well, I guess they didn't want our business after all.

I apologize for the delay.

Please email me at david.stein[at]zerto.com with your details and I will make sure to clear up the matter for you.

Again I apologize for the delay and can assure you we are interested in speaking with you.
 
Well coming from me I have both and they both serve very distinct purposes. I have 275 VM's protected using Zerto to give me ABOVE STANDARD DR capabilities. Veeam cannot even come close to touching the RTO/RPO that Zerto provides. I currently use Veeam to replicate a small handful of vm's in my environment which are tier 2-3 in my dataset. Hands down Zerto handles all of my Tier 1 vm's and I sleep so much better at night knowing they are replicating the way they are supposed to be. I do use Veeam to backup all 330 of my vms that I have in my production site. In my enviroment 1 hour of downtime just paid the cost of Zerto. No brainer in my opinion.

Rich
 
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