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.
"We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable."
"The installation and initial setup are straightforward."
"The product is evolving and the vendor is committed to change."
"VMware SRM is a very nice tool for disaster recovery for virtual environments."
"The solution is consistent."
"The most valuable feature is disaster recovery testing."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with our Nutanix environment."
"Testing failover capabilities."
"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 testing features are the most valuable features of this solution. We use the failover test feature not just for testing failovers and disaster recovery, we've also had clients use it for development purposes as well as patching purposes to test patches. We can failover the VM and then we can make any changes we want without affecting production. It's a nice sandbox for that usage."
"The stability is great; there's very little downtime. I don't have to worry that there will be a surprise update to one of the ZVRAs or the host that I have to contend with. We're given plenty of notice to plan ahead for an update. As far as losing service and downtime, we haven't had that happen."
"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."
"We have seen ROI. The biggest way that we have seen it is in avoided downtime. We have had outages before, and we count downtime in terms of dollars spent. We have cut that down so dramatically, which provides us a very quick ROI. We have drastically reduced the amount of time it takes us to recover workloads, from an average of two hours to an average of 10 minutes."
"Our RPOs and RTOs are now more in line with our other critical systems."
"Consistency Groups: If you replicate groups of VMs, then during failover, all of the VMs in groups are failed over to the exact same point in time."
"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."
"The solution is on the expensive side."
"The interface is not easy to use and can be made more user-friendly."
"I would like to see better integration with other storage solutions. I would hope to see that within the next two or three years."
"The user experience could be more friendly."
"The solution currently has a five-minute RPO, meaning if the VM goes down we can lose up to five minutes of data which is a big deal when it relates to database replication."
"There is room for improvement in the automation and orchestration aspects of this solution."
"In my view, if VMware comes up with an appliance-based solution like vCenter Server (which was also Windows-based), it will be much easier for deployment. I"
"Timing issues arise due to replication lags in multiple areas. When this happens, we encounter errors."
"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 monitoring and alerting functionality need to be improved."
"It would be nice if we were able to purchase single licenses for Zerto. As it is now, scaling requires that we purchase a multi-pack."
"I would like Zerto to provide more detailed information when there is an issue."
"It would be difficult to do, but I would love it if Zerto handled some of the scripting and things necessary to do a recovery. For example, it would be helpful if the solution could update the DNS to point to a new location. It would be nice to automate some of those tasks that you have to do to recover a VM and they were kinda out-of-the-box point-and-click things rather than things that required you to write a script."
"It would also be nice if they could find a way to make it where one VM does not impact the entire journal history of the VPG."
"The syncing of the replication needs improvement. My experience has been that, every once in a while, when you go to do a failover, it tells you it's not syncing. Then you have to troubleshoot and figure out why it's not fully synced up."
"Zerto's solution could benefit from additional security features, such as malware scanning tools at the recovery site."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 69 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, Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, Commvault Cloud 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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