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.
"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."
"If you want to do failover, it works without any problem."
"The stability of SRM has been excellent. It gets a nine-out-of-ten."
"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 most valuable features are the disaster recovery and testing."
"This SRM solution can improve your footprint within a data center."
"In terms of resiliency, the most valuable aspect of SRM has been its effectiveness."
"Zerto is so easy to use that when I showed it to my manager, he said jokingly, 'Huh. I could use it myself, I don't need you.' Zerto is most elegant."
"The replication and recovery features are the most valuable... On two occasions, other departments in our organization reported issues with specific virtual machines. We used the checkpoint feature of the Zerto to enable the recovery of those machines to a point that was a few minutes prior to the problem."
"It works really well. It's simple to set up and works well. Moreover, disaster recovery to the cloud to our organization is very important. We actually had to use it three years ago, and it worked out well for us."
"There are several valuable features because of the way we use it. The backup and restore features are definitely indispensable."
"The RTO and RPO are unparalleled. In the event you do have an issue, you can be back up and running (depending on the size of your infrastructure) within minutes. Your RTO can be 15 minutes and data loss be five minutes. I don't think that's matched by anybody else in the field."
"Our RTO is quick, and we can recover five to ten terabytes of data within minutes of a failover."
"We can failover to an isolated environment and validate the application without impacting the production environment. We can do more testing in a non-impactful way..."
"I found the very easy VPG setup, the easy recovery, and failover testing to be the most valuable features."
"You need a lot of knowledge to work with the interface because it is not really easy to use, and it would be great if the dashboard were simplified."
"The two vCenters have to be synchronized, which sometimes gives us problems because Keberos does not tolerate more than five minutes in time difference."
"In general, the drawbacks of VMware SRM, where improvements can be made, stem from the fact that it is an expensive and complex product."
"The back sites sometimes are very, very complicated."
"The solution could improve by removing some of the limitations we have been facing. There could be better integrated."
"If you have a failover case, you need to work on it manually. It would be helpful if this could be automated. It would simplify things."
"We have had an issue when some customers have traditional designs and sites. For example, on one another site, they are using hyper-converged, using VMware, or Nutanix. We have a problem with the synchronization between the storage for site to site. This is the main issue. We are adding some other tools to support the synchronization to allow the movement of the workload from site to site easily."
"Flexibility to choose different PITs would be nice."
"The biggest pain points we have experienced are related to some of the SQL-intensive workloads just because the VPGs struggle a little bit to keep up. That might be because we are pushing too many transactions."
"They could improve their online documentation."
"The licensing is confusing and complicated."
"The overall management plan could improve. If something happens with the VM on the vSphere side, the error codes are pretty weak. If there was a way to click on something within the UI that takes us to a support page or article, that would be very beneficial."
"The limitation with Zerto is that you're required to have one Zerto Manager per virtual center, and this means that you're only able to replicate one way. Technical support for this product was fantastic, before they were acquired by HP. You're now able to tell that the company is becoming too big, in terms of the support they provide."
"The problem with the backup product is that it's not very mature and you really need a specific use case to be able to use it effectively. It's hard to explain to our customers, especially our large customers, that the use case is so limited."
"From the relationship standpoint, we have never had a local rep in South Bend, Indiana. It has always been somebody in Boston, and there is not a lot of communication. That is one of the big things. We would like help driving the business and talking to our sales people as well as more involvement from them. We could really utilize it more, drawing more customers in, but we need help with that."
"We would like the LTR function to be able to retain the past 12 months."
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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