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.
"Virtual Machine Recovery during DR situation, with automation and easy to use menus and options."
"The solution is simple to use and has effective automation."
"The most valuable feature is the automation, where you press a button and everything fails over seamlessly."
"The most valuable feature of VMware SRM is its integration with the VMware platform."
"This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center."
"I would rate the ease of setting up and configuring my recovery plan in VMware SRM, a ten out of ten, with ten being the easiest."
"The most valuable feature is the integration with our Nutanix environment."
"VMware is one of the best products in the industry when it comes to virtualization."
"When we replicated our data, I turned up the machine, and it was up in seconds. It blew my mind. I could not believe it."
"One of the most valuable features, something that I wasn't even anticipating, is the file backups. We weren't even considering Zerto to do restores, but it actually is able to do that. Eventually, we could just use this as our backup solution."
"The real-time replication of data is the most valuable feature. It is a vast improvement in scheduled daily backups. Real-time data is streamed to the offsite data center, which allows us to restore our mission-critical applications up to 10 seconds from when the last changes were made in our system. If we enter a sales order or enter any kind of information in our ERP application it is replicated within 10 seconds to the offsite location."
"We are moving to a new data center. There are several VMs that we have to move over there that have RDM disks or SQL clusters. Those are the hardest things to move at this point in time, but now that I have the setup and it is ready to go, all we have to do is just flip the switch and get everything over where they are supposed to be. It is going to be a lifesaver for me. It will save me a whole lot of time in putting things back together."
"Zerto is essential for protecting critical workloads. We don't protect all of our VMs, but some need to be recovered in a timely manner. The recovery time is almost immediate."
"The most valuable feature is Zerto's ability to precopy data to a remote destination prior to the actual live migration period. That saves us a lot of time and has been very helpful. For example, if we had migrations occurring in waves over a period of several weeks with a VPG or VPG setup of approximately 50 VMs, that is multiple gigabytes of data, even terabytes in many cases. Having that data already copied on the evening of the migration saves considerable hours of time. It easily saves us four to six hours a night."
"Zerto is fast to restore our mission-critical servers when needed."
"I've used backup solutions like Veeam in the past, but Zerto seemed like a better, faster solution. We adopted Zerto because of the speed, and because we wanted to do everything in-house."
"The solution could improve by removing some of the limitations we have been facing. There could be better integrated."
"It would be good if this solution could integrate configuration management software such as Chef Infra."
"The initial setup of VMware SRM isn't straightforward because many customizations are required since it helps in the recovery of your IT environment."
"Technical support can take some time to respond."
"The two vCenters have to be synchronized, which sometimes gives us problems because Keberos does not tolerate more than five minutes in time difference."
"I would like to see this solution be more scalable."
"In my opinion, the integration with Peer Persistent Storage could be improved."
"The price, in general, could be lower."
"There are quite a few elements in the long-term retention areas that I wish were better. The bio-level recovery indexing of backups is the area I struggle with the most. That's probably because I desire to do tasks that ordinary users wouldn't do with the solution. The standard medium to large customer would probably never ask for anything like I ask for, so I think it's pretty good the way it is. I'm excited to see some of the new improvements coming in the 9.5 version. Some of the streamlines and how the product presents itself for some of the recovery features could be better."
"The product could benefit from improvements in automation, specifically in the area of failovers."
"I would like to have an overall orchestration capability that would enable you to do multiple VPGs in some sort of order, with delays in between."
"We wanted to shut down the dev environment to focus on the prod environment. We couldn't find any option in Zerto to do that."
"It would be nice to have the option to do automatic failover, but right now the only option is manual."
"We have had issues with licensing, where the license we've been given by Zerto support doesn't include VSS replication, which was a pain at the time."
"It would be beneficial if Zerto also offered integration with other cloud management platforms, such as VMware Aria Automation."
"The alerting has room for improvement as it is the biggest pain point with the software. It is so bad. It is just general alerting on or off. There are so many emails all the time. You have no control over it, which is terrible. It is the worst part of the entire application. I have voiced this to Zerto hundreds of times for things like feature changes. Apparently, it's coming, but there is nothing concrete as to when you can do it."
VMware SRM is ranked 6th in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 69 reviews while Zerto is ranked 2nd in Disaster Recovery (DR) Software with 234 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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