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.
"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."
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"The thing I like the most about SMR is the reduced cost of management."
"Virtual Machine Recovery during DR situation, with automation and easy to use menus and options."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."
"It has a good and effective user interface."
"Testing failover capabilities."
"Incorporating non-disruptive testing capability in disaster recovery procedures has significantly benefited the overall recovery testing processes."
"The most valuable feature of Zerto for us is its DR capability."
"We have had many instances where VMs were corrupted by an application owner, where they were installing something and did not create a snapshot in VMware for it. Instead of tapping into our backups, with just two clicks, we were able to restore the VM back to its original state. It helps a lot in the day-to-day running of our business."
"The replication and recovery features are the most valuable... On two occasions, other departments in our organization reported issues with specific virtual machines. We used the checkpoint feature of the Zerto to enable the recovery of those machines to a point that was a few minutes prior to the problem."
"The live failover tests and point-in-time recovery options have been exceptionally valuable features of Zerto for our organization."
"We work a lot with customers that need disaster recovery and the best possible migration approaches, and Zerto helps them minimize the amount of effort it takes to finish their upgrades or migrations."
"Live replication and up to the second type of failover are valuable. The fact that we can do test failovers and failbacks is important for our ISO certification."
"The way we can use checkpoints from each VM to restore them is an excellent feature, and the replication is great."
"It enables protection of a virtual workload to be done by the app, whether single or multi-tiered, with a boot time scheduler. It is pretty awesome."
"The interface is not easy to use and can be made more user-friendly."
"Cost is definitely an area where the product could be improved."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"The back sites sometimes are very, very complicated."
"It would be good if this solution could integrate configuration management software such as Chef Infra."
"The product's stability could be better."
"You need a lot of knowledge to work with the interface because it is not really easy to use, and it would be great if the dashboard were simplified."
"SRM may hit some OS issues related to IP changes, but they are usually OS related, especially in the 2008 realm."
"The technical support is hit or miss."
"Customer service and technical support need improvement."
"The VPG model causes us a bit of concern. We are considering using Zerto to replace Site Recovery Manager. Site Recovery Manager is very easy when we have entire data scores being replicated. We don't have to make any decisions when it comes to groupings. It is all covered. If we move to Zerto, which we are considering, we will have to work much closer with the applications teams to develop the VPG configuration and determine how the VMs will be grouped. It will be a lot more overhead for us to go that route."
"This solution could be improved by being more cloud agnostic."
"Another thing that would help would be a recommender, or some type of tool that says, 'Hey, you're not conforming to best practices.' It would do a conformance or compliance check to tell you if your VPGs are set up according to best practices and whether your Zerto clusters are set up optimally. It would see if you have HA enabled and whether your alerting is turned on."
"The reporting could be improved in terms of the reports that you can show to auditors to prove that you have done the testing. I provide the reports that it generates now but, it would be great if, at the end of a DR test, it would generate a report of everything that Zerto did."
"They had a bug recently that has come up and caused some issues. They currently have a bug in their production versions that prevents their product from functioning in some scenarios, and we have hit a few of those scenarios."
"The backup functions are in need of improvement."
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, Nutanix Disaster Recovery as a Service and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, whereas Zerto is most compared with Veeam Backup & Replication, Rubrik, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery and Azure Site Recovery. See our VMware SRM vs. Zerto report.
See our list of best Disaster Recovery (DR) Software vendors.
We monitor all Disaster Recovery (DR) Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.