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 a very nice tool for disaster recovery for virtual environments."
"Incorporating non-disruptive testing capability in disaster recovery procedures has significantly benefited the overall recovery testing processes."
"Testing failover capabilities."
"The UI is very user-friendly and testing is easy."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can independently run the disaster recovery without disturbing the production instances."
"It has a good and effective user interface."
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center."
"If we had to deal with a ransomware event, Zerto would be one of the first things I would use, because it is going to be the fastest to restore data to a certain point. If there were a fire in our building, Zerto would be a big thing too, because we would shut down everything that's in our building. In most cases, Zerto is definitely one of the front lines. It's definitely going to be one of our prevalent DRBC layers of protection."
"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."
"The ability to test which virtual machines can be failed over to our DR site without interruption of our production environment."
"The Zerto university for training staff is very useful."
"Journaling is by far the most valuable feature. We have used it several times for customers who have gotten ransomware and had to do a rollback. Having the right time period was important. Some of them had their backups encrypted. So, they didn't encrypt the Zerto machine seven days previously, and we were able to bring that back up."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to recover critical systems, such as public safety, within a few minutes. In addition, the RPO is six seconds of data loss, tops."
"Journaling allows us to leverage Zerto's journal for sub-minute recoveries, instead of having to wait for the storage array to replicate."
"RPO time for the copied-off VMs appears to be quite short."
"The initial setup of VMware SRM isn't straightforward because many customizations are required since it helps in the recovery of your IT environment."
"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"SRM may hit some OS issues related to IP changes, but they are usually OS related, especially in the 2008 realm."
"The version we are currently using is not the latest and greatest but it has buggy behavior in some browsers."
"You cannot use VMware SRM in conjunction with storage replication software."
"The two vCenters have to be synchronized, which sometimes gives us problems because Keberos does not tolerate more than five minutes in time difference."
"SRM has to be installed on two separate data centers, so both have to be coordinated very well, which becomes complicated when configuring the software for disaster recovery."
"I would like to see improvement on the Zerto Virtual Replication appliances, so that they are a little bit more streamlined as opposed to now where they just span multiple ZVR appliances like there were gremlins... as this thing grows it just spawns unlimited numbers of additional ZVR appliances and you end up with a bunch so that you can't really tell which is which."
"There are certain things about the user interface that could be a little bit more user-friendly."
"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."
"It needs to support more public cloud."
"In general, the solution is pretty good, but because it is geared toward simplicity, sometimes, when things go wrong, the answer is not very detailed so that things can be solved quickly. If things do go wrong, it does require a little bit deeper troubleshooting to resolve the issues. That's the only area where improvement could occur. There should be a little bit more details about if things go wrong, how to remedy them."
"I had a couple of questions after deployment, but nothing major, about a couple of ways I could tweak it."
"From the technical side, there can be a little bit more PowerShell integration. I know it leverages APIs, but people still use PowerShell. Some people would rather use PowerShell if that is an option."
"The tech support on my latest issue wasn't so great. I had to figure a lot of stuff out myself. It could be that I had a Level 1 tech who was new or something, but it seemed like the tech was spitballing, which does not help me."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 69 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 233 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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