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.
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"SRM's best feature is automation."
"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery testing."
"Virtual Machine Recovery during DR situation, with automation and easy to use menus and options."
"The product functionality is fairly high-quality."
"Testing failover capabilities."
"Its capability to schedule, write and configure the recovery and scheduled steps, such that you don't have to come in and start manually trying to recover the entire machine. You just push a button to recover the VMware and everything is done."
"Incorporating non-disruptive testing capability in disaster recovery procedures has significantly benefited the overall recovery testing processes."
"We had a disaster recovery four or five years ago. I can't remember what happened, but I believe something crashed in our data center, like a power outage. We did a failover of our network using Zerto from production to disaster recovery. We successfully completed the failover process in three or four hours without issue. The data was current, and the application owners could access their data and continue working while the issue was resolved."
"The orchestration and automation of the DR and how it replicates the VMs and then picks them up in the DR site have been most valuable."
"The most valuable features are the continuous streaming, that it takes very little CPU usage — it doesn't affect production — and the recovery time is very short."
"Zerto's ability to test failovers with a record of how long it takes to fail the motor is beneficial, as it allows us to know the timing in the event we have to do it live."
"The ability to quickly bring up VMs within a test environment allows us to test our disaster recovery functions and ensures that they would function just as well in an actual disaster scenario."
"The low RPO times of about four to eight seconds are very nice and very valuable to us."
"The ease of failover and test environments has proven invaluable."
"Four years ago when we did a PoC between two other vendors and Zerto, there were two features of Zerto that sold it, hands-down. One was the ease of creating protection groups, the ease with which our engineers could create protection, add virtual machines into the Zerto product, and get them under DR protection."
"Cost is definitely an area where the product could be improved."
"Sometimes it can cause a bit of downtime during switchovers."
"I would like to see better integration with other storage solutions. I would hope to see that within the next two or three years."
"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."
"I would like to see this solution be more scalable."
"It would be better if we could get more reporting features in VMware SRM."
"There is room for improvement in the automation and orchestration aspects of this solution."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"Long-term retention of files is a function that isn't available yet that I'm looking forward to them providing. The long-term retention is the only other thing that I think needs improvement."
"I would like to have an overall orchestration capability that would enable you to do multiple VPGs in some sort of order, with delays in between."
"I would like to be able to replicate one to multiple without having to recreate every VPG. That would save us a lot of time. When we add a site or move our DR to a different site, I have to recreate everything from scratch. So, it'd be cool to be able to just repoint an existing VPG to a new site without having to recreate everything."
"When I have a technical question, it sometimes takes a while for tech support to respond."
"It would be beneficial if Zerto also offered integration with other cloud management platforms, such as VMware Aria Automation."
"Zerto requires these thick provision walls for virtual machines that are always running."
"We have had some issues with trying to get certain parts of the backup or restore functionality to work."
"If they already do not have it, they can have some APIs for the Horizon environment. Instead of having to use some scripts to get around, they can make it a lot more user-friendly for integration."
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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