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.
"I like how VMware SRM is able to automate and orchestrate disaster recovery."
"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 replication is a key feature."
"The solution helps to improve business continuity processes. Its automatic failover and failback policies have been wonderful."
"The UI is very user-friendly and testing is easy."
"The most valuable feature of VMware SRM is its integration with the VMware platform."
"The solution is scalable."
"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."
"The near-synchronous replication is key. That has allowed us to provide the low RPOs that we promise. For key systems, that has been the deciding factor."
"The pricing and licensing are excellent. It's very straightforward."
"The ability to test which virtual machines can be failed over to our DR site without interruption of our production environment."
"Zerto has helped reduce our organization's DR testing to seconds to minutes. We have been able to save probably close to 200 hours a year."
"It's the easiest to use."
"The most valuable features are the single pane of glass and the reduction in time it takes for our systems engineering team to manage the platform."
"It is cost-effective and stable. It protects virtual machines, and there is a fast recovery time."
"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."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"SRM may hit some OS issues related to IP changes, but they are usually OS related, especially in the 2008 realm."
"There are many functionality problems with the product currently. It is also slow and unstable."
"There is room for improvement in the automation and orchestration aspects of this solution."
"The price, in general, could be lower."
"One thing which is lacking from the SRM is reporting."
"We have had an issue when some customers have traditional designs and sites. For example, on one another site, they are using hyper-converged, using VMware, or Nutanix. We have a problem with the synchronization between the storage for site to site. This is the main issue. We are adding some other tools to support the synchronization to allow the movement of the workload from site to site easily."
"The replication layer can probably be improved."
"If I have to reboot a virtual machine host, I have issues with Zerto catching up afterward. That's about the only thing I would say needs improvement. Sometimes, when I have to do maintenance, Zerto takes a little bit to catch up. That's understandable."
"The only issue that I observed was that depending on the number of virtual machines that are being replicated, you will have to provision the appropriate bandwidth for the link that the replicated systems will traverse."
"It has some quirks. We have quirks with appliances. Some things don't really work as expected, but it is minor."
"Right now, our production environment runs on-premises, and we have a DR copy of everything that we run in production. However, our development runs on that hardware. In the case of a DR event, we would need to shut down development and bring up our secondary copy of production. We're hoping that Zerto is going to be the tool to help us do that."
"It would be advantageous if Zerto had plugins for Infoblox, Cisco, or load balancers, as this would enable us to better manage those records."
"Not all of the knowledge required for implementing Zerto is available in their online documentation for non-partners."
"We did look at the long-term retention backup feature of Zerto a few years ago, and at that time, it was limited. I can't say what it is right now, but at the time, its functionality was limited in terms of basically where we could save it and how we could save it. Offsite air gapping our backups is important to us to help protect against ransomware, and at the time, it couldn't do that. That would be one area that would be important before we consider using the long-term retention again. I haven't looked at it recently, and they may have addressed this in the meantime, but if not, this would be an area of improvement."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 72 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 235 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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