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.
"SRM's best feature is automation."
"Our systems fail over using SRM. So, we do a big bang DR, which is biannual, and we fail over our fairly massive Epic electronic health record (EHR) and our core applications. It takes us about 30 minutes to fail over using SRM, which is pretty good. In most hospitals that have Epic installed, Epic does the audit to make sure that we can fail over if something were to happen. Normally, sites will have a DR solution specific to the EHR, but right now, our pain point is the third-party tier-one clinical applications."
"The solution is consistent."
"VMware SRM is very effective between two sites with identical twin storage, you can have synchronization between the two sites."
"The most valuable features are the disaster recovery and testing."
"This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center."
"The product is evolving and the vendor is committed to change."
"We find the back up feature of this solution to be particularly valuable."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. The online documentation is very clear and helpful. We are able to solve a lot of problems on our own without having to contact support."
"Stable disaster recovery solution with a very simple setup and fast failover."
"It gives us a seamless, performant data center migration. When we were migrating between physical data centers, we did what normally would have been a 72-hour job in about 18 hours. A large part of that was thanks to Zerto being able to rate limit and throttle how much data was being sent or transfers were happening. Being able to script around it and create governors was important. We didn't have that previously. That is one big use case that has saved an immense amount of time and effort."
"The most valuable features are the continuous streaming, that it takes very little CPU usage — it doesn't affect production — and the recovery time is very short."
"Zerto's ease of use is outstanding; it's easy to set up and has a clear interface and menus. The reporting, analytics, and online monitoring are also excellent."
"I prefer Zerto because it's a little more automated. VMware has more requirements... It's a little more click-and-go versus click-and-monitor..."
"Since we are at a bank, there are certain protocols in place where we need to have RPO and RTO times of two hours or less. Zerto does a great job of setting those times and alerting us if those can't be met. We have our help desk actively monitoring that. It is extremely helpful that Zerto lists what is falling out of compliance in regards to RPO and RTO. It has been great in that regard."
"The communication between the VM and the secondary data center is the most valuable feature."
"Technical support needs improvement, they are not very responsive."
"We would like the patching management function of this product to be improved."
"An improvement for SRM would be better interface compatibility with other products."
"It would be good if this solution could integrate configuration management software such as Chef Infra."
"Lacks stability and as a result requires continuous monitoring."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"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"
"The solution is on the expensive side."
"One thing I would like to see in their roadmap is introducing long-term storage in the cloud such as Azure or AWS. They can make it more seamless."
"When it comes to a solution, one of the things the management wants is to standardize platforms. That's why when Rubrik came out with their solution, they wanted to look at it. For instance, if you have multiple technologies, you're going to need admins to manage all those different ones. I would like Zerto to be something that fits all our needs, including the backup that Rubrik provides, but I understand that not all solutions can be that way."
"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."
"Improvements in stability would be welcome; there are some software bugs that can affect RPOs. We want more of a guarantee that we won't lose any of our backups, even in the event of a disaster."
"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 is crucial for Zerto to collaborate closely with VMware in order to promptly test updates."
"I would like to request better reporting in Zerto. I can see the data that I need in the console, but if I need to put the data or the history into a report, it is difficult. It is something that auditors might require, so reporting is something that needs to be improved."
"One thing I would like to see, and I know that this is on their roadmap, is the ability to use long-term storage in the cloud, like in Azure or AWS, making that even more seamless. Whether it's stored in glacier or on-prem, being able to retrieve that data in a quick manner would be helpful. They're just not there yet."
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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