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.
"The most valuable features are the disaster recovery and testing."
"VMware SRM is a very nice tool for disaster recovery for virtual environments."
"The solution is strong when it comes to protection and analytics, with the latter being added later on."
"In terms of recovery, if you have a test job script, you can put it on top of it. You can create custom steps so that it will be more granular. It will be an easy, one click solution when it comes to the recovery application."
"VMware SRM replicates the VM from one site to another, and it helps us orchestrate the powering of VMs and DR when the DC goes down."
"It eliminates the need for complex compliance requirements, making it a highly effective solution."
"The solution can be deployed in a couple of hours."
"I like how VMware SRM is able to automate and orchestrate disaster recovery."
"There are a lot of valuable features. The basics of what it does to replicate and recover things within minutes is awesome. It's far above anything that any of the competition has. We offer other disaster recovery software but primarily use Zerto for recovery times and the number of recovery points because of how fast and easy it is. It's so much better."
"When we need to failover or move workloads, Zerto significantly decreases both the time it takes and the number of people involved. It only takes a single person to activate a failover and we can pretty much automate everything else."
"Zerto is intuitive. We could set everything up in the environment within a day and a half and start migrating on the third day."
"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."
"The second feature that sold us was the sub-second RPO. One of the things that made Zerto's product stand out from some of the more traditional solutions four years ago was its ability to maintain sub-second RPO over a group of machines, and that group of machines could be spread over multiple storage hardware."
"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."
"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."
"It is pretty easy to use. The interface is intuitive and easy to use. Once you set it up, it just works. So, it is great."
"The solution must provide better integration with third-party vendors."
"The solution is on the expensive side."
"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."
"Lacks stability and as a result requires continuous monitoring."
"An improvement for SRM would be better interface compatibility with other products."
"There needs to be better stability during heavy capacity in future releases."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"We have had some issues with trying to get certain parts of the backup or restore functionality to work."
"We're an NSX-T shop, and if I could get an NSX-T integration where it could manage the networks a little tighter, that would be an improvement."
"The product could benefit from improvements in automation, specifically in the area of failovers."
"I need to get up to the latest version so I can move my journals to a particular LUN, saving them with a particular storage altogether, rather than with the virtual machine. This is not available until I upgrade, and I need to upgrade all my hypervisors. This would be something that would be nice to have if it could be used on older versions."
"The alerting doesn't quite give you the information about what exactly is going on when an issue comes up. We do get alerts inside of our vCenter, but it doesn't quite give you accurate information inside the plugin to be able to tell us what's going on without having to go into the actual Zerto application and figuring out what's causing the issue."
"Now, everything is moving to the cloud and many modern app solutions are based on virtualization and cloud, however, for situations where Unix platforms are used, we'd like them to be able to support that."
"I would like to see a separate product offer for performing backups, although I think that this is something that they are expecting to release in the next version."
"An integrated encryption would allow for faster initial install and connection to the remote cloud 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 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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