We performed a comparison between VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager) and Zerto based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Zerto wins out in this competition. Its consistent sub-second response for RTO and RPO makes it one of the most responsive and fastest in the marketplace today. Users are able to easily run tests and change scenarios without any effect on an organization's production.
"VMware SRM is very effective between two sites with identical twin storage, you can have synchronization between the two sites."
"It made the DR process a lot faster and easier for recovery after we were familiar with the product operation."
"In terms of resiliency, the most valuable aspect of SRM has been its effectiveness."
"VMware SRM's most valuable features are its convenience and its use of stretched clusters."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances."
"It's very reliable. The solution is stable."
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"The simplicity of VMware SRM is one of its most important features. SRM console is straightforward to manage. It offers simplicity in monitoring, managing, and deploying, making it a unique value proposition. Additionally, Nutanix solutions also provide a simple GUI, which helps in operational efficiency."
"The mobile application is very useful as a real-time monitoring, reporting tool. When asked the status of our machine backup and recovery ability, an easy answer is to display the status on the real-time application or browser. The Zerto Analytics tool helps predict future storage needs by tracking trends in space, journal size, and I/O rate. These are reportable statistics making quantifiable tracking easy and accurate. Having a web interface simplifies access by other system administrators."
"Most of the time, this is at least a two person job. We used to have three people doing it. Previously, when we had a disaster recovery drill, the way it worked was 12 of us would show up in the office on a Friday night and work overnight from 12:00 AM on Friday night to 8:00 AM in the morning on Saturday. Then, three of us would be working for four hours out of those eight or nine hours just getting applications up and running in Arizona. Now, for the disaster recovery drill, I just stay onsite to help and assist anybody else as they need during that time frame and my work is done in about a 30-minute time frame. This is compared to the four or five hours it used to take for the three of us to do it."
"We don't have to spend a whole lot of time worrying about DR and whether or not we are covered. Zerto just works. As it is replicating, we don't need to spend a whole lot of time with it. That is a huge benefit as far as daily management."
"Zerto is fast to restore our mission-critical servers when needed."
"The return to operations is the most valuable feature because it decreases the amount of time it takes us to recover."
"The ability to test which virtual machines can be failed over to our DR site without interruption of our production environment."
"The most important feature is that the recovery point (RPO) is less than one minute. The is really good for our customers, as they can keep their data loss to a minimum."
"We're able to replicate all of our data and be able to bring up an entire data center within a matter of minutes, which has become our go-to for our resiliency within both of our data centers."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"The primary site lacks adequate equipment, such as power backup and cooling, which can lead to downtime during issues like power outages or overheating."
"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."
"The back sites sometimes are very, very complicated."
"The user experience could be more friendly."
"This product is not appropriate for those moving to a broader cloud footprint."
"An improvement for SRM would be better interface compatibility with other products."
"Currently, there is a limitation of consolidating only 15 sites per SRM."
"There are certain things about the user interface that could be a little bit more user-friendly."
"One thing I would like to see, and I know that this is on their roadmap, is the ability to use long-term storage in the cloud, like in Azure or AWS, making that even more seamless. Whether it's stored in glacier or on-prem, being able to retrieve that data in a quick manner would be helpful. They're just not there yet."
"I am a little bit worried about how Zerto will work with large volumes of data, such as replication for big data and very large files."
"Their data backup and restore have some ways to go."
"Zerto's connectivity with automation platforms could be improved. For example, vCenter can use a VMware-developed tool called Site Recovery Manager. That can be integrated with automation platforms such as Terraform, Ansible, Chef, or Puppet, to perform automated, self-sufficient recoveries to essentially avoid any downtime. To my knowledge, Zerto does not have integration with those platforms."
"The only complaint is that if I remove a host from a cluster, it does not like that. If I move and put the host in maintenance mode to fix it, and vRA is down, Zerto does not like it. Zerto should figure out that this host has an issue and it went down. Zerto should then let me upload that vRA information to another vRA."
"The technical support has room for improvement."
"It is expensive."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 73 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 236 reviews. VMware SRM is rated 8.0, while Zerto is rated 9.0. The top reviewer of VMware SRM writes "A scalable solution that integrates well with the VMware platform, but its platform agnostics do not support on-cloud usage". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zerto writes "Gives us business continuity capabilities during hurricane season and in case of ransomware". VMware SRM is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Azure Site Recovery, VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service , whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Commvault Cloud, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery. See our VMware SRM vs. Zerto report.
See our list of best Disaster Recovery (DR) Software vendors.
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